


THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE 



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THE CUTTING 
OF AN AGATE 



BY 
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 

AUTHOR OF "ideas OF GOOD AND 
EVIL," ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1912 

All righU reserved 



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COPTKIGHT, 1912, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1912. 



©CU327785 



PREFACE 

When I wrote the essay on Edmund Spen- 
ser the company of Irish players who have 
now their stage at the Abbey Theatre in 
Dublin had been founded, but gave as yet 
few performances in a twelvemonth. I 
could let my thought stray where it would, 
and even give a couple of summers to The 
Faerie Queene; while for some ten years 
now I have written little verse and no prose 
that did not arise out of some need of those 
players or some thought suggested by their 
work, or was written in the defence of some 
friend whose life has been a part of the 
movement of events which is creating a new 
Ireland unintelligible to an old Ireland that 
watches with anger or indifference. The de- 
tailed defence of plays and players, published 
originally in Samhain, the occasional peri- 
odical of the theatre, and now making some 
three hundred pages of Mr. Bullen's col- 
lected edition of my writings, is not here, 



vi PBEFACE 

but for the most part an exposition of 
principles, whether suggested by my own 
work or by the death of friend or fellow- 
worker, that, intended for no great public, has 
been printed and published from a Hand 
Press which my sisters manage at Dundrum 
with the help of the village girls. I have 
been busy with a single art, that of the thea- 
tre, of a small, unpopular theatre ; and this 
art may well seem to practical men, busy with 
some programme of industrial or political 
regeneration, of no more account than the 
shaping of an agate ; and yet in the shaping 
of an agate, whether in the cutting or the mak- 
ing of the design, one discovers, if one have a 
speculative mind, thoughts that seem impor- 
tant and principles that may be applied to 
life itself, and certainly if one does not be- 
lieve so, one is but a poor cutter of so hard a 

stone. 

W. B. YEATS. 
August, 1912. 



CONTENTS 

PAQB 

Thoughts on Lady Gregory's Translations 

I. Cuchulain and his Cycle ... 1 

II. Fion and his Cycle .... 12 

Preface to the First Edition op the Well 

OF THE Saints 36 

Discoveries 

Prophet, Priest and King .... 49 

Personality and the Intellectual Essences . 56 

The Musician and the Orator ... 61 

A Guitar Player 63 

The Looking-glass 65 

The Tree of Life 67 

The Praise of Old Wives' Tales ... 71 

The Play of Modern Manners ... 73 
Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a 

Root of its Own ? 76 

Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was 

made a Poet 79 

Concerning Saints and Artists ... 85 

The Subject Matter of Drama ... 89 

The Two Kinds of Asceticism ... 94 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

In the Serpent's Mouth .... 97 

The Black and the White Arrows . . 99 

His Mistress's Eyebrows .... 100 
The Tresses of the Hair . . . .103 

A Tower on the Apennines .... 104 
The Thinking of the Body . . . .106 

Religious Belief Necessary to Religious Art 109 

The Holy Places 113 

poetey and tradition 116 

Preface to the First Edition of John M. 

Synge's Poems and Translations . 139 

J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time 146 

The Tragic Theatre 196 

John Shawe-Taylor 208 

Edmund Spenser 213 



THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE 



THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE 



THOUGHTS ON LADY GREGORY'S 
TRANSLATIONS 



CUCHULAIN AND HIS CYCLE 

The Church when it was most powerful 
taught learned and unlearned to climb, as 
it were, to the great moral realities through 
hierarchies of Cherubim and Seraphim, 
through clouds of Saints and Angels who 
had all their precise duties and privileges. 
The story-tellers of Ireland, perhaps of 
every primitive country, imagined as fine 
a fellowship, only it was to the aesthetic 
realities they would have had us cUmb. 
They created for learned and unlearned 
alike, a communion of heroes, a cloud of 
stalwart witnesses ; but because they were 
as much excited as a monk over his prayers, 

B 1 



2 LADT GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

they did not think sufficiently about the 
shape of the poem and the story. We 
have to get a little weary or a little dis- 
trustful of our subject, perhaps, before 
we can lie awake thinking how to make 
the most of it. They were more anxious 
to describe energetic characters, and to 
invent beautiful stories, than to express 
themselves with perfect dramatic logic 
or in perfectly-ordered words. They 
shared their characters and their stories, 
their very images, with one another, and 
handed them down from generation to 
generation ; for nobody, even when he 
had added some new trait, or some new 
incident, thought of claiming for himself 
what so obviously lived its own merry or 
mournful life. The maker of images or 
worker in mosaic who first put Christ upon 
a cross would have as soon claimed as his 
own a thought which was perhaps put 
into his mind by Christ himself. The 
Irish poets had also, it may be, what 
seemed a supernatural sanction, for a 
chief poet had to understand not only 
innumerable kinds of poetry, but how to 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 3 

keep himself for nine days in a trance. 
Surely they believed or half believed in 
the historical reality of even their wildest 
imaginations. And so soon as Christian- 
ity made their hearers desire a chronology 
that would run side by side with that of 
the Bible, they delighted in arranging their 
Kings and Queens, the shadows of for- 
gotten mythologies, in long lines that 
ascended to Adam and his Garden. Those 
who listened to them must have felt as if 
the hving were like rabbits digging their 
burrows under walls that had been built 
by Gods and Giants, or like swallows 
building their nests in the stone mouths 
of immense images, carved by nobody 
knows who. It is no wonder that one 
sometimes hears about men who saw in a 
vision ivy-leaves that were greater than 
shields, and blackbirds whose thighs were 
like the thighs of oxen. The fruit of all 
those stories, unless indeed the finest ac- 
tivities of the mind are but a pastime, is 
the quick inteUigence, the abundant imag- 
ination, the courtly manners of the Irish 
country-people. 



4 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

William Morris came to Dublin when 
I was a boy, and I had some talk with him 
about these old stories. He had intended 
to lecture upon them, but Hhe ladies and 
gentlemen ' — he put a conamunistic fer- 
vour of hatred into the phrase — knew 
nothing about them. He spoke of the 
Irish account of the battle of Clontarf and 
of the Norse account, and said, that one 
saw the Norse and Irish tempers in the two 
accounts. The Norseman was interested 
in the way things are done, but the Irish- 
man turned aside, evidently well pleased 
to be out of so dull a business, to describe 
beautiful supernatural events. He was 
thinking, I suppose, of the young man who 
came from Aoibhill of the Grey Rock, 
giving up immortal love and youth, that 
he might fight and die by Murrough's 
side. He said that the Norseman had the 
dramatic temper, and the Irishman had 
the lyrical. I think I should have said 
with Professor Ker, epical and romantic 
rather than dramatic and lyrical, but his 
words, which have so great an authority, 
mark the distinction very well, and not 



LADY GREGOBT'S TRANSLATIONS 5 

only between Irish and Norse, but be- 
tween Irish and other un-Celtic Hteratures. 
The Irish story-teller could not interest 
himself with an unbroken interest in the 
way men like himself burned a house, or 
won wives no more wonderful than them- 
selves. His mind constantly escaped out 
of daily circumstance, as a bough that has 
been held down by a weak hand suddenly 
straightens itself out. His imagination 
was always running to Tir-nan-og, to the 
Land of Promise, which is as near to the 
country-people of to-day as it was to 
Cuchulain and his companions. His be- 
lief in its nearness, cherished in its turn 
the lyrical temper, which is always athirst 
for an emotion, a beauty which cannot be 
found in its perfection upon earth, or only 
for a moment. His imagination, which 
had not been able to believe in Cuchulain's 
greatness, until it had brought the Great 
Queen, the red-eyebrowed goddess, to woo 
him upon the battlefield, could not be 
satisfied with a friendship less romantic 
and lyrical than that of Cuchulain and 
Ferdiad, who kissed one another after the 



6 LADY GEEGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 

day's fighting, or with a love less romantic 
and lyrical than that of Baile and Aillinn, 
who died at the report of one another's 
deaths, and married in Tir-nan-og. His 
art, too, is often at its greatest when it is 
most extravagant, for he only feels himself 
among solid things, among things with fixed 
laws and satisfying purposes, when he has 
reshaped the world according to his heart's 
desire. He understands as well as Blake 
that the ruins of time build mansions in 
eternity, and he never allows anything, 
that we can see and handle, to remain 
long unchanged. The characters must 
remain the same, but the strength of Fer- 
gus may change so greatly, that he, who a 
moment before was merely a strong man 
among many, becomes the master of Three 
Blows that would destroy an army, did 
they not cut off the heads of three little 
hills instead, and his sword, which a fool 
had been able to steal out of its sheath, 
has of a sudden the likeness of a rainbow. 
A wandering lyric moon must knead and 
kindle perpetually that moving world of 
cloaks made out of the fleeces of Mananan ; 



LADT GBEGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 7 

of armed men who change themselves into 
sea-birds ; of goddesses who become crows ; 
of trees that bear fruit and flower at the 
same time. The great emotions of love, 
terror and friendship must alone remain 
untroubled by the moon in that world 
which is still the world of the Irish country- 
people, who do not open their eyes very 
wide at the most miraculous change, at 
the most sudden enchantment. Its events, 
and things, and people are wild, and are 
like unbroken horses, that are so much 
more beautiful than horses that have 
learned to run between shafts. One 
thinks of actual life, when one reads those 
Norse stories, which had shadows of their 
decadence, so necessary were the propor- 
tions of actual life to their efforts, when 
a dying man remembered his heroism 
enough to look down at his wound and say, 
' Those broad spears are coming into fash- 
ion' ; but the Irish stories make us under- 
stand why some Greek writer called myths 
the activities of the daemons. The great 
virtues, the great joys, the great privations, 
come in the myths, and, as it were, take 



8 LADT GREGOEY'S TRANSLATIONS 

mankind between their naked arms, and 
without putting off their divinity. Poets 
have chosen their themes more often from 
stories that are all, or half, mythological, 
than from history or stories that give one 
the sensation of history, understanding, as 
I think, that the imagination which remem- 
bers the proportions of life is but a long 
wooing, and that it has to forget them before 
it becomes the torch and the marriage-bed. 
One finds, as one expects, in the work 
of men who were not troubled about any 
probabilities or necessities but those of 
emotion itself, an immense variety of inci- 
dent and character and of ways of express- 
ing emotion. Cuchulain fights man after 
man during the quest of the Brown Bull, 
and not one of those fights is like another, 
and not one is lacking in emotion or strange- 
ness ; and when one thinks imagination can 
do no more, the story of the Two Bulls, 
emblematic of all contests, suddenly lifts 
romance into prophecy. The characters 
too have a distinctness we do not find 
among the people of the Mabinogion, per- 
haps not even among the people of the 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 9 

Morte D' Arthur. We know we shall be 
long forgetting Cuchulain, whose life is 
vehement and full of pleasure, as though 
he always remembered that it was to be 
soon over; or the dreamy Fergus who 
betrays the sons of Usnach for a feast, 
without ceasing to be noble ; or Conal who 
is fierce and friendly and trustworthy, but 
has not the sap of divinity that makes 
Cuchulain mysterious to men, and be- 
loved of women. Women indeed, with 
their lamentations for lovers and husbands 
and sons, and for fallen rooftrees and lost 
wealth, give the stories their most beauti- 
ful sentences; and, after Cuchulain, one 
thinks most of certain great queens — of 
angry, amorous Mseve, with her long, pale 
face ; of Findabair, her daughter, who 
dies of shame and of pity ; of Deirdre, who 
might be some mild modern housewife but 
for her prophetic wisdom. If one does not 
set Deirdre's lamentations among the great- 
est lyric poems of the world, I think one 
may be certain that the wine-press of the 
poets has been trodden for one in vain; 
and yet I think it may be proud Emer, 



10 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

Cuchulain's fitting wife, who will linger 
longest in the memory. What a pure 
flame burns in her always, whether she 
is the newly-married wife fighting for pre- 
cedence, fierce as some beautiful bird, or 
the confident housewife, who would awaken 
her husband from his magic sleep with 
mocking words; or the great queen who 
would get him out of the tightening net 
of his doom, by sending him into the Valley 
of the Deaf, with Niamh, his mistress, 
because he will be more obedient to her; 
or the woman whom sorrow has set with 
Helen and Iseult and Brunnhilda, and 
Deirdre, to share their immortality in the 
rosary of the poets. 

'"And oh! my love!" she said, "we 
were often in one another's company, and 
it was happy for us; for if the world had 
been searched from the rising of the sun 
to sunset, the like would never have been 
found in one place, of the Black Sainglain 
and the Grey of Macha, and Laeg the 
chariot-driver, and myself and Cuchulain." 

'And after that Emer bade Conal to 
make a wide, very deep grave for Cuchu- 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 11 

lain ; and she laid herself down beside her 
gentle comrade, and she put her mouth to his 
mouth, and she said : "Love of my life, my 
friend, my sweetheart, my one choice of the 
men of the earth, many is the woman, wed 
or unwed, envied me until to-day ; and now 
I will not stay living after you." ' 

To us Irish, these personages should be 
very moving, very important, for they 
lived in the places where we ride and go 
marketing, and sometimes they have met 
one another on the hills that cast their 
shadows upon our doors at evening. If 
we will but tell these stories to our chil- 
dren the Land will begin again to be a Holy 
Land, as it was before men gave their hearts 
to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I 
was a child I had only to climb the hill 
behind the house to see long, blue, ragged 
hills flowing along the southern horizon. 
What beauty was lost to me, what depth 
of emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, 
because nobody told me, not even the 
merchant captains who knew everything, 
that Cruachan of the Enchantments lay 
behind those long, blue, ragged hills ! 



12 LADY GBEGORT'S TRANSLATIONS 
II 

FION AND HIS CYCLE 

A FEW months ago I was on the bare 
Hill of Allen, 'wide Almhuin of Leinster,' 
where Finn and the Fianna are said to 
have had their house, although there are 
no earthen mounds there like those that 
mark the sites of old houses on so many 
hills. A hot sun beat down upon flower- 
ing gorse and fiowerless heather; and on 
every side except the east, where there 
were green trees and distant hills, one saw 
a level horizon and brown boglands with 
a few green places and here and there the 
glitter of water. One could imagine that 
had it been twilight and not early after- 
noon, and had there been vapours drifting 
and frothing where there were now but 
shadows of clouds, it would have set stir- 
ring in one, as few places even in 
Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to 
Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 13 

a mystery coming not as with Gothic 
nations out of the pressm^e of darkness, 
but out of great spaces and windy Hght. 
The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now 
called, with its green mounds and its 
partly-wooded sides, and its more gradual 
slope set among fat grazing lands, with 
great trees in the hedgerows, had brought 
before one imaginations, not of heroes 
who were in their youth for hundreds of 
years, or of women who came to them in 
the likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings 
that lived brief and politic lives, and of the 
five white roads that carried their armies 
to the lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or 
brought to the great fair that had given 
Teamhair its sovereignty all that sought 
justice or pleasure or had goods to barter. 
■■■ It is certain that we must not confuse 
these kings, as did the medieval chroni- 
clers, with those half-divine kings of Alm- 
huin. The chroniclers, perhaps because 
they loved tradition too well to cast out 
utterly much that they dreaded as Chris- 
tians, and perhaps because popular im- 
agination had begun the mixture, have 



14 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

mixed one with another ingeniously, mak- 
ing Finn the head of a kind of Mihtia 
under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed 
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second 
century, and making Grania, who travels 
to enchanted houses under the cloak of 
iEngus, god of Love, and keeps her troub- 
ling beauty longer than did Helen hers, 
Cormac 's daughter, and giving the stories 
of the Fianna, although the impossible has 
thrust its proud finger into them all, a 
curious air of precise history. It is only 
when we separate the stories from that 
medieval pedantry, that we recognise 
one of the oldest worlds that man has 
imagined, an older world certainly than 
we find in the stories of Cuchulain, who 
lived, according to the chroniclers, about 
the time of the birth of Christ. They are 
far better known, and we may be certain of 
the antiquity of incidents that are known 
in one form or another to every Gaelic- 
speaking countryman in Ireland or in the 
Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a la- 
bourer digging near to a cromlech, or Bed 
of Diarmuid and Grania as it is called, 



LADT GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 15 

will tell you a tradition that seems older 
and more barbaric than any description 
of their adventures or of themselves in 
written text or in story that has taken 
form in the mouths of professed story- 
tellers. Finn and the Fianna found wel- 
come among the court poets later than did 
Cuchulain; and one finds memories of 
Danish invasions and standing armies 
mixed with the imaginations of hunters 
and solitary fighters among great woods. 
We never hear of Cuchulain delighting in 
the hunt or in woodland things; and one 
imagines that the story-teller would have 
thought it unworthy in so great a man, 
who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, 
and could delight in his chariot and his 
chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses. If 
he is in the woods before dawn we are not 
told that he cannot know the leaves of the 
hazel from the leaves of the oak ; and when 
Emer laments him no wild creature comes 
into her thoughts but the cuckoo that 
cries over cultivated fields. His story 
must have come out of a time when the 
wild wood was giving way to pasture and 



16 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

tillage, and men had no longer a reason 
to consider every cry of the birds or change 
of the night. Finn, who was always in the 
woods, whose battles were but hours amid 
years of hunting, delighted in the 'cack- 
ling of ducks from the Lake of the Three 
Narrows; the scolding talk of the black- 
bird of Doire an Cairn; the bellowing of 
the ox from the Valley of the Berries; 
the whistle of the eagle from the Valley 
of Victories or from the rough branches of 
the Ridge of the Stream ; the grouse of the 
heather of Cruachan ; the call of the otter 
of Druim re Coir.' When sorrow comes 
upon the queens of the stories, they have 
sympathy for the wild birds and beasts 
that are like themselves : ' Credhe wife 
of Cael came with the others and went 
looking through the bodies for her comely 
comrade, and crying as she went. And 
as she was searching she saw a crane of 
the meadows and her two nestlings, and 
the cunning beast the fox watching the 
nestlings; and when the crane covered 
one of the birds to save it, he would make 
a rush at the other bird, the way she had 



LADY GBEGOBY'S TBANSLATIONS 17 

to stretch herself out over the birds; and 
she would sooner have got her own death 
by the fox than the nestlings to be killed 
by him. And Credhe was looking at that, 
and she said : ''It is no wonder I to have 
such love for my comely sweetheart, and 
the bird in that distress about her nest- 
lings."' 

One often hears of a horse that shivers 
with terror, or of a dog that howls at 
something a man's eyes cannot see, and 
men who live primitive lives where in- 
stinct does the work of reason are fully 
conscious of many things that we cannot 
perceive at all. As life becomes more 
orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural 
world sinks farther away. Although the 
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he 
is the son of one of the greatest of them, 
their country and his are far apart, and 
they come to him as god to mortal; but 
Finn is their equal. He is continually in 
their houses ; he meets with Bodb Dearg, 
and iEngus, and Mananan, now as friend 
with friend, now as with an enemy he over- 
comes in battle; and when he has need 
c 



18 LADT GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

of their help his messenger can say : ' There 
is not a king's son or a prince, or a leader 
of the Fianna of Ireland, without having 
a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or 
a sweetheart of the Tuatha de Danaan.' 
When the Fianna are broken up at last, 
after hundreds of years of hunting, it is 
doubtful that he dies at all, and certain that 
he comes again in some other shape, and 
Oisin, his son, is made king over a divine 
country. The birds and beasts that cross 
his path in the woods have been fighting- 
men or great enchanters or fair women, 
and in a moment can take some beautiful 
or terrible shape. We think of him and of 
his people as great-bodied men with large 
movements, that seem, as it were, flowing 
out of some deep below the shallow stream 
of personal impulse, men that have broad 
brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in 
a good luck that proves every day afresh 
that they are a portion of the strength 
of things. They are hardly so much 
individual men as portions of universal 
nature, like the clouds that shape them- 
selves and reshape themselves momentarily, 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 19 

or like a bird between two boughs, or like 
the gods that have given the apples and the 
nuts; and yet this but brings them the 
nearer to us, for we can remake them in our 
image when we will, and the woods are 
the more beautiful for the thought. Do 
we not always fancy hunters to be some- 
thing like this, and is not that why we 
think them poetical when we meet them 
of a sudden, as in these lines in Pauline ? 

' An old hunter 
Talking- with gods ; or a liigh-crested chief 
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.' 

One must not expect in these stories the 
epic lineaments, the many incidents woven 
into one great event of, let us say, the story 
of the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, 
or that of the last gathering at Muir- 
themne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, 
which is a long story, has nothing of the 
clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed 
but a succession of detached episodes. 
The men who imagined the Fianna had 
the imagination of children, and as soon 
as they had invented one wonder, heaped 
another on top of it. Children — or, at 



20 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

any rate, it is so I remember my own child- 
hood — do not understand large design, 
and they delight in little shut-in places 
where they can play at houses more than 
in great expanses where a country-side 
takes, as it were, the impression of a 
thought. The wild creatures and the 
green things are more to them than to 
us, for they creep towards our hght by 
little holes and crevices. When they 
imagine a country for themselves it is 
always a country where you can wander 
without aim, and where you can never 
know from one place what another will be 
like, or know from the one day's adven- 
ture what may meet you with to-morrow's 
sun. 

Children play at being great and won- 
derful people, at the ambitions they will 
put away for one reason or another before 
they grow into ordinary men and women. 
Mankind as a whole had a like dream once ; 
everybody and nobody built up the dream 
bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are 
there to make us remember what mankind 
would have been like, had not fear and the 



LADY GBEGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 21 

failing will and the laws of nature tripped up 
its heels. The Fianna and their like are 
themselves so full of power, and they are 
set in a world so fluctuating and dream- 
like, that nothing can hold them from 
being all that the heart desires. 

I have read in a fabulous book that 
Adam had but to imagine a bird and it 
was born into life, and that he created all 
things out of himself by nothing more im- 
portant than an unflagging fancy; and 
heroes who can make a ship out of a shav- 
ing have but little less of the divine pre- 
rogatives. They have no speculative 
thoughts to wander through eternity and 
waste heroic blood ; but how could that be 
otherwise ? for it is at all times the proud 
angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side 
and not the people of Eden. One morn- 
ing we meet them hunting a stag that is 
'as joyful as the leaves of a tree in summer- 
time ' ; and whatever they do, whether 
they listen to the harp or follow an en- 
chanter over-sea, they do for the sake of 
joy, their joy in one another, or their joy 
in pride and movement; and even their 



22 LADT GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

battles are fought more because of their 
dehght in a good fighter than because of 
any gain that is in victory. They five 
always as if they were playing a game; 
and so far as they have any deliberate 
purpose at all, it is that they may become 
great gentlemen and be worthy of the 
songs of the poets. It has been said, and I 
think the Japanese were the first to say it, 
that the four essential virtues are to be 
generous among the weak, and truthful 
among one's friends, and brave among 
one's enemies, and courteous at all times ; 
and if we understand by courtesy not 
merely the gentleness the story-tellers 
have celebrated, but a delight in courtly 
things, in beautiful clothing and in beau- 
tiful verse, one understands that it was no 
formal succession of trials that bound the 
Fianna to one another. Only the Table 
Round, that is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet 
from the same well-head, is bound in a like 
fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues 
are troubled by the abstract virtues of the 
cloister. Every now and then some noble 
knight builds a cell upon the hill-side, or 



LADT GBEGOBT'S TRANSLATIONS 23 

leaves kind women and joyful knights to 
seek the vision of the Grail in lonely ad- 
ventures. But when Oisin or some kingly 
forerunner — Bran, son of Febal, or the 
like — rides or sails in an enchanted ship 
to some divine country, he but looks for a 
more delighted companionship, or to be in 
love with faces that will never fade. No 
thought of any life greater than that of 
love, and the companionship of those that 
have drawn their swords upon the dark- 
ness of the world, ever troubles their 
delight in one another as it troubles Iseult 
amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. 
It is an ailment of our speculation that 
thought, when it is not the planning of 
something, or the doing of something, or 
some memory of a plain circumstance, 
separates us from one another because it 
makes us always more unlike, and because 
no thought passes through another's ear 
unchanged. Companionship can only be 
perfect when it is founded on things, for 
things are always the same under the 
hand, and at last one comes to hear with 
envy the voices of boys lighting a lantern to 



24 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

ensnare moths, or of the maids chattering in 
the kitchen about the fox that carried off a 
turkey before breakfast. Lady Gregory's 
book of tales is full of fellowship untroubled 
like theirs, and made noble by a com-tesy 
that has gone perhaps out of the world. 
I do not know in literature better friends 
and lovers. Wlien one of the Fianna finds 
Osgar dying the proud death of a young 
man, and asks is it well with him, he is 
answered, 'I am as you would have me be.' 
The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed 
but their pride and joy in one another, 
their good fellowship. Goll, old and savage, 
and letting himself die of hunger in a cave 
because he is angry and sorry, can speak 
lovely words to the wife whose help he 
refuses. 'It is best as it is,' he said, 'and 
I never took the advice of a woman east 
or west, and I never will take it. And oh, 
sweet-voiced queen,' he said, 'what ails 
you to be fretting after me? And re- 
member now your silver and your gold, 
and your silks . . . and do not be crying 
tears after me, queen with the white hands,' 
he said, 'but remember your constant 



LADY GBEGORY'S TBAlffSLATIONS 25 

lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the 
world, that came from Spain asking for 
you, and that I fought on Corcar-an- 
Dearg ; and go to him now,' he said, ' for 
it is bad when a woman is without a good 
man.' 

They have no asceticism, but they are 
more visionary than any ascetic, and their 
invisible life is but the life about them made 
more perfect and more lasting, and the 
invisible people are their own images in the 
water. Their gods may have been much 
besides this, for we know them from frag- 
ments of mythology picked out with 
trouble from a fantastic history running 
backward to Adam and Eve, and many 
things that may have seemed wicked to the 
monks who imagined that history, may 
have been altered or left out; but this 
they must have been essentially, for the 
old stories are confirmed by apparitions 
among the country-people to-day. The 
Men of Dea fought against the mis-shapen 
Fomor, as Finn fights against the Cat- 
Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when 
they are overcome at last by men, they 



26 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

make themselves houses in the hearts 
of hills that are like the houses of men. 
When they call men to their houses and 
to their Country Under-Wave they prom- 
ise them all that they have upon earth, 
only in greater abundance. The god Mid- 
hir sings to Queen Etain in one of the most 
beautiful of the stories : ' The young never 
grow old ; the fields and the flowers are 
as pleasant to be looking at as the black- 
bird's eggs; warm streams of mead and 
wine flow through that country; there is 
no care or no sorrow on any person; we 
see others, but we ourselves are not seen.' 
These gods are indeed more wise and 
beautiful than men ; but men, when they are 
great men, are stronger than they are, for 
men are, as it were, the foaming tide-line 
of their sea. One remembers the Druid 
who answered, when someone asked him 
who made the world, 'The Druids made 
it.' All was indeed but one life flowing 
everywhere, and taking one quality here, 
another there. It sometimes seems as if 
there is a kind of day and night of religion, 
and that a period when the influences are 



LADY GREGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 27 

those that shape the world is followed by 
a period when the greater power is in 
influences that would lure the soul out of 
the world, out of the body. When Oisin 
is speaking with St. Patrick of the friends 
and the life he has outlived, he can but 
cry out constantly against a religion 
that has no meaning for him. He laments, 
and the country-people have remembered 
his words for centuries : ' I will cry my 
fill, but not for God, but because Finn and 
the Fianna are not living.' 

Old writers had an admirable sjmibolism 
that attributed certain energies to the 
influence of the sun, and certain others to 
the lunar influence. To lunar influence 
belong all thoughts and emotions that 
were created by the community, by the 
common people, by nobody knows who, 
and to the sun all that came from the 
high disciplined or individual kingly mind. 
I myself imagine a marriage of the sun and 
moon in the arts I take most pleasure in ; 
and now bride and bridegroom but ex- 
change, as it were, full cups of gold and 
silver, and now they are one in a mystical 



28 LADY GBEGORT'S TRANSLATIONS 

embrace. From the moon come the folk- 
songs imagined by reapers and spinners 
out of the common impulse of their labour, 
and made not by putting words together, 
but by mixing verses and phrases, and the 
folk-tales made by the capricious mixing 
of incidents known to everybody in new 
ways, as one deals out cards, never getting 
the same hand twice over. When one 
hears some fine story, one never knows 
whether it has not been hazard that put 
the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, 
as it seems to me, desires an infinity of 
wonder or emotion, for where there is no 
individual mind there is no measurer-out, 
no marker-in of limits. The poor fisher 
has no possession of the world and no re- 
sponsibility for it ; and if he dreams of a 
love-gift better than the brown shawl 
that seems too common for poetry, why 
should he not dream of a glove made from 
the skin of a bird, or shoes made from the 
skin of a herring, or a coat made from the 
glittering garment of the salmon ? Was it 
not iEschylus who said he but served 
up fragments from the banquet of Homer ? 



LADY GEEGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 29 

— but Homer himself found the great 
banquet of an earthen floor and under a 
broken roof. We do not know who at the 
foundation of the world made the banquet 
for the first time, or who put the pack of 
cards into rough hands ; but we do know 
that, unless those that have made many 
inventions are about to change the nature 
of poetry, we may have to go where Homer 
went if we are to sing a new song. Is it 
because all that is under the moon thirsts 
to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in 
some unbounded tidal stream, that the 
songs of the folk are mournful, and that the 
story of the Fianna, whenever the queens 
lament for their lovers, reminds us of 
songs that are still sung in country- 
places? Their grief, even when it is to 
be brief like Grania's, goes up into the 
waste places of the sky. But in supreme 
art, or in supreme life there is the in- 
fluence of the sun too, and the sun 
brings with it, as old writers tell us, not 
merely discipline but joy ; for its discipline 
is not of the kind the multitudes impose 
upon us by their weight and pressure, but 



30 LADY GBEGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

the expression of the individual soul, turn- 
ing itself into a pure fire and imposing its 
own pattern, its own music, upon the heavi- 
ness and the dumbness that is in others 
and in itself. When we have drunk the cold 
cup of the moon's intoxication, we thirst for 
something beyond ourselves, and the mind 
flows outward to a natural immensity; 
but if we have drunk from the hot cup 
of the sun, our own fulness awakens, we 
desire little, for wherever one goes one's 
heart goes too ; and if any ask what music 
is the sweetest, we can but answer, as 
Finn answered, 'What happens.' And 
yet the songs and stories that have come 
from either influence are a part, neither 
less than the other, of the pleasure that is 
the bride-bed of poetry. 

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art 
has been made, not by the artist choosing 
his material from wherever he has a mind 
to, but by adding a little to something 
which it has taken generations to invent, 
has always had a popular literature. We 
cannot say how much that literature has 
done for the vigour of the race, for who 



LADY GBEGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 31 

can count the hands its praise of kings 
and high-hearted queens made hot upon 
the sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it 
made lustful for strength and beauty? 
We remember indeed that when the farming 
people and the labourers of the towns made 
their last attempt to cast out England by 
force of arms they named themselves after 
the companions of Finn. Even when 
Gaelic has gone and the poetry with it, 
something of the habit of mind remains 
in ways of speech and thought and 'come- 
all-ye's' and poetical sayings; nor is it 
only among the poor that the old thought 
has been for strength or weakness. Surely 
these old stories, whether of Finn or Cu- 
chulain, helped to sing the old Irish and 
the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their 
end. They heard their hereditary poets 
and story-tellers, and they took to horse 
and died fighting against Elizabeth or 
against Cromwell; and when an English- 
speaking aristocracy had their place, it 
listened to no poetry indeed, but it felt 
about it in the popular mind an exacting 
and ancient tribunal, and began a play that 



32 LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

had for spectators men and women that 
loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not 
think that their own mixed blood or the 
habit of their time need take all, or nearly 
all, credit or discredit for the impulse that 
made those gentlemen of the eighteenth 
century fight duels over pocket-handker- 
chiefs, and set out to play ball against the 
gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter 
money before the public eye; and at 
last, after an epoch of such eloquence the 
world has hardly seen its like, lose their 
public spirit and their high heart, and 
grow querulous and selfish, as men do who 
have played life out not heartily but with 
noise and tumult. Had they known the 
people and the game a little better, they 
might have created an aristocracy in an 
age that has lost the understanding of the 
word. When one reads of the Fianna, or 
of Cuchulain, or of any of their like, one 
remembers that the fine life is always a 
part played finely before fine spectators. 
There also one notices the hot cup and the 
cold cup of intoxication ; and when the 
fine spectators have ended, surely the fine 



LADT GREGOBY'S TRANSLATIONS 33 

players grow weary, and aristocratic life 
is ended. When O'Connell covered with a 
dark glove the hand that had killed a man 
in the duelling-field, he played his part; 
and when Alexander stayed his army 
marching to the conquest of the world 
that he might contemplate the beauty of 
a plane-tree, he played his part. When 
Osgar complained as he lay dying of the 
keening of the women and the old fighting- 
men, he too played his part ; ' No man ever 
knew any heart in me,' he said, 'but a 
heart of twisted horn, and it covered with 
iron; but the howling of the dogs beside 
me,' he said, 'and the keening of the old 
fighting-men and the crying of the women 
one after another, those are the things that 
are vexing me.' If we would create a 
great community — and what other game 
is so worth the labour ? — we must re- 
create the old foundations of life, not as 
they existed in that splendid misunder- 
standing of the eighteenth century, but 
as they must always exist when the finest 
minds and Ned the beggar and Seaghan 
the fool think about the same thing, 

D ' 



34 LADT GBEGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 

although they may not think the same 
thought about it. 

When I asked the little boy who had 
shown me the pathway up the Hill of 
Allen if he knew stories of Finn and 
Oisin, he said he did not, but that he had 
often heard his grandfather telling them 
to his mother in Irish. He did not know 
Irish, but he was learning it at school, and 
all the little boys he knew were learning it. 
In a little while he will know enough 
stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to 
his children some day. It is the owners of 
the land whose children might never have 
known what would give them so much 
happiness. But now they can read Lady 
Gregory's book to their children, and it 
will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and Ben- 
bulben, the great mountain that showed 
itself before me every day through all my 
childhood and was yet unpeopled, and 
half the country-sides of south and west, 
as populous with memories as her Cuchu- 
lain of Muirthemne will have made Dun- 
dealgan and Emain Macha and Muir- 
themne ; and after a while somebody may 



LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS 35 

even take them to some famous place and 
say, 'This land where your fathers lived 
proudly and finely should be dear and dear 
and again dear ; ' and perhaps when many 
names have grown musical to their ears, 
a more imaginative love will have taught 
them a better service. 



Ill 



I praise but in brief words the noble writ- 
ing of these books, for words that praise a 
book, wherein something is done supremely 
well, remain, to sound in the ears of a 
later generation, like the foolish sound of 
church bells from the tower of a church 
when every pew is full. 

1903. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 
OF THE WELL OF THE SAINTS 

Six years ago I was staying in a students' 
hotel in the Latin Quarter, and somebody, 
whose name I cannot recollect, introduced 
me to an Irishman, who, even poorer than 
myself, had taken a room at the top of the 
house. It was J. M. Synge, and I, who 
thought I knew the name of every Irish- 
man who was working at literature, 
had never heard of him. He was a 
graduate of Trinity College, Dubhn, too, 
and Trinity College does not, as a rule, 
produce artistic minds. He told me that 
he had been living in France and Germany, 
reading French and German Literature, 
and that he wished to become a writer. 
He had, however, nothing to show but one 
or two poems and impressionistic essays, 
full of that kind of morbidity that has its 
root in too much brooding over methods 
of expression, and ways of looking upon 
life, which come, not out of life, but out 
36 



PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 37 

of literature, images reflected from mirror 
to mirror. He had wandered among 
people whose life is as picturesque as the 
middle ages, playing his fiddle to Italian 
sailors, and listening to stories in Bavarian 
woods, but life had cast no light into his 
writings. He had learned Irish years ago, 
but had begun to forget it, for the only 
language that interested him was that 
conventional language of modern poetry 
which has begun to make us all weary. 
I was very weary of it, for I had finished 
The Secret Rose, and felt how it had 
separated my imagination from life, send- 
ing my Red Hanrahan, who should have 
trodden the same roads with myself, 
into some undiscoverable country. I said, 
'Give up Paris, you will never create any- 
thing by reading Racine, and Arthur 
Symons will always be a better critic of 
French literature. Go to the Arran 
Islands. Live there as if you were one of 
the people themselves; express a life 
that has never found expression.' I had 
just come from Arran, and my imagina- 
tion was full of those grey islands where 



38 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

men must reap with knives because of the 
stones. 

He went to Arran and became a part of 
its life, living upon salt fish and eggs, 
talking Irish for the most part, but listen- 
ing also to the beautiful English which has 
grown up in Irish-speaking districts, and 
takes its vocabulary from the time of 
Malory and of the translators of the 
Bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor 
from Irish. When Mr. Synge began to 
write in this language, Lady Gregory had 
already used it finely in her translations of 
Dr. Hyde's lyrics and plays, or of old Irish 
literature, but she had listened with differ- 
ent ears. He made his own selection of 
word and phrase, choosing what would 
express his own personality. Above all, 
he made word and phrase dance to a very 
strange rhythm, which will always, till 
his plays have created their own tradition, 
be difficult to actors who have not learned 
it from his lips. It is essential, for it 
perfectly fits the drifting emotion, the 
dreaminess, the vague yet measureless 
desire, for which he would create a dra- 



PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 39 

matic form. It blurs definition, clear edges, 
everything that comes from the will, it 
turns imagination from all that is of the 
present, like a gold background in a reli- 
gious picture, and it strengthens in every 
emotion whatever comes to it from far off, 
from brooding memory and dangerous 
hope. When he brought The Shadow of the 
Glen, his first play, to the Irish National 
Theatre Society, the players were puzzled 
by the rhythm, but gradually they became 
certain that his woman of the glens, as 
melancholy as a curlew, driven to dis- 
traction by her own sensitiveness, her own 
fineness, could not speak with any other 
tongue, that all his people would change 
their life if the rhythm changed. Perhaps 
no Irish countryman had ever that exact 
rhythm in his voice, but certainly if Mr. 
Synge had been born a countryman, he 
would have spoken like that. It makes the 
people of his imagination a little dis- 
embodied ; it gives them a kind of inno- 
cence even in their anger and their cursing. 
It is part of its maker's attitude towards 
the world, for while it makes the clash 



40 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

of wills among his persons indirect and 
dreamy, it helps him to see the subject- 
matter of his art with wise, clear-seeing, 
unreflecting eyes; to preserve the inno- 
cence of good art in an age of reasons and 
purposes. Whether he write of old beggars 
by the roadside, lamenting over the misery 
and ugliness of life, or of an old Arran woman 
mourning her drowned sons, or of a young 
wife married to an old husband, he has no 
wish to change anything, to reform any- 
thing; all these people pass by as before 
an open window, murmuring strange, ex- 
citing words. 

If one has not fine construction, one 
has not drama, but if one has not beautiful 
or powerful and individual speech, one 
has not literature, or, at any rate, one has not 
great literature. Rabelais, Villon, Shake- 
speare, William Blake, would have known 
one another by their speech. Some of them 
knew how to construct a story, but all of 
them had abundant, resonant, beautiful, 
laughing, living speech. It is only the 
writers of our modern dramatic movement, 
our scientific dramatists, our naturalists 



PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 41 

of the stage, who have thought it possible 
to be Uke the greatest, and yet to cast 
aside even the poor persiflage of the come- 
dians, and to write in the impersonal 
language that has come, not out of individ- 
ual life, nor out of life at all, but out 
of necessities of commerce, of parliament, 
of board schools, of hurried journeys by 
rail. 

If there are such things as decaying art 
and decaying institutions, their decay 
must begin when the element they receive 
into their care from the life of every man 
in the world, begins to rot. Literature 
decays when it no longer makes more beau- 
tiful, or more vivid, the language which 
unites it to all life, and when one finds the 
criticism of the student, and the purpose 
of the reformer, and the logic of the man 
of science, where there should have been 
the reveries of the common heart, ennobled 
into some raving Lear or unabashed Don 
Quixote. One must not forget that the 
death of language, the substitution of 
phrases as nearly impersonal as algebra for 
words and rhythms varying from man to 



42 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

man, is but a part of the tyranny of im- 
personal things. I have been reading 
through a bundle of German plays, and 
have found everywhere a desire not to 
express hopes and alarms common to 
every man that ever came into the world, 
but politics or social passion, a veiled or 
open propaganda. Now it is duelling 
that has need of reproof; now it is the 
ideas of an actress, returning from the free 
life of the stage, that must be contrasted 
with the prejudice of an old-fashioned 
town ; now it is the hostility of Christianity 
and Paganism in our own day that is to 
find an obscure symbol in a bell thrown 
from its tower by spirits of the wood. I 
compare the work of these dramatists 
with the greater plays of their Scandina- 
vian master, and remember that even 
he, who has made so many clear-drawn 
characters, has made us no abundant 
character, no man of genius in whom we 
could believe, and that in him also, even 
when it is Emperor and Galilean that are 
face to face, even the most momentous 
figures are subordinate to some tendency, 



PBEFACE OF TEE WELL OF SAINTS 43 

to some movement, to some inanimate 
energy, or to* some process of thought 
whose very logic has changed it into 
mechanism — always to something other 
than human life. 

We must not measure a young talent, 
whether we praise or blame, with that of 
men who are among the greatest of our 
time, but we may say of any talent, follow- 
ing out a definition, that it takes up the 
tradition of great drama as it came from 
the hands of the masters who are acknow- 
ledged by all time, and turns away from a 
dramatic movement, which, though it 
has been served by fine talent, has been 
imposed upon us by science, by artificial 
life, by a passing order. 

When the individual life no longer de- 
lights in its own energy, when the body 
is not made strong and beautiful by the 
activities of daily life, when men have 
no delight in decorating the body, one may 
be certain that one lives in a passing 
order, amid the inventions of a fading 
vitality. If Homer were alive to-day, he 
would only resist, after a deliberate struggle. 



44 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

the temptation to find his subject not in 
Helen's beauty, that every man has 
desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance 
of Odysseus that has been the desire of 
every woman that has come into the world, 
but in what somebody would describe, 
perhaps, as Hhe inevitable contest,' arising 
out of economic causes, between the 
country-places and small towns on the 
one hand, and, upon the other, the great 
city of Troy, representing one knows not 
what tendency to centralisation.' 

Mr. Synge has in common with the 
great theatre of the world, with that of 
Greece and that of India, with the creator 
of Falstaff, with Racine, a delight in lan- 
guage, a preoccupation with individual 
life. He resembles them also by a pre- 
occupation with what is lasting and noble, 
that came to him, not as I think from books, 
but while he listened to old stories in the 
cottages, and contrasted what they remem- 
bered with reality. The only literature 
of the Irish country-people is their songs, 
full often of extravagant love, and their 
stories of kings and of kings' children. 'I 



PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 45 

will cry my fill, but not for God, but be- 
cause Finn and the Fianna are not living,' 
says Oisin in the story. Every writer, 
even every small writer, who has belonged 
to the great tradition, has had his dream 
of an impossibly noble life, and the greater 
he is, the more does it seem to plunge him 
into some beautiful or bitter reverie. 
Some, and of these are all the earliest poets 
of the world, gave it direct expression; 
others mingle it so subtly with reality, that 
it is a day's work to disentangle it ; others 
bring it near by showing one whatever is 
most its contrary. Mr. Synge, indeed, 
sets before us ugly, deformed or sinful 
people, but his people, moved by no prac- 
tical ambition, are driven by a dream of 
that impossible life. That we may feel 
how intensely his woman of the glen 
dreams of days that shall be entirely alive, 
she that is ' a hard woman to please ' must 
spend her days between a sour-faced old 
husband, a man who goes mad upon the 
hills, a craven lad and a drunken tramp; 
and those two blind people of The Well 
of the Saints are so transformed by the 



46 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

dream, that they choose bhndness rather 
than reaUty. He tells us of realities, but 
he knows that art has never taken more 
than its symbols from anything that the 
eye can see or the hand measure. 

It is the preoccupation of his characters 
with their dream that gives his plays their 
drifting movement, their emotional subt- 
lety. In most of the dramatic writing of 
our time, and this is one of the reasons why 
our dramatists do not find the need for 
a better speech, one finds a simple motive 
lifted, as it were, into the full light of the 
stage. The ordinary student of drama will 
not find anywhere in The Well of the Sairits 
that excitement of the will in the presence 
of attainable advantages, which he is 
accustomed to think the natural stuff of 
drama, and if he see it played he will 
wonder why act is knitted to act so loosely, 
why it is all, as it were, flat, why there is 
so much leisure in the dialogue, even in the 
midst of passion. If he see the Shadow 
of the Glen, he will ask, why does this 
woman go out of her house? Is it be- 
cause she cannot help herself, or is she con- 



PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 47 

tent to go? Why is it not all made 
clearer? And yet, like everybody when 
caught up into great events, she does 
many things without being quite certain 
why she does them. She hardly under- 
stands at moments why her action has a 
certain form, more clearly than why her 
body is tall or short, fair or brown. She 
feels an emotion that she does not under- 
stand. She is driven by desires that need 
for their expression, not 'I admire this 
man,' or 'I must go, whether I will or no,' 
but words full of suggestion, rhythms of 
voice, movements that escape analysis. 
In addition to all this, she has something 
that she shares with none but the children 
of one man's imagination. She is intoxi- 
cated by a dream which is hardly under- 
stood by herself, but possesses her like 
something half remembered on a sudden 
wakening. 

While I write, we are rehearsing The 
Well of the Saints, and are painting for it 
decorative scenery, mountains in one or 
two flat colours and without detail, ash 
trees and red salleys with something of 



48 PREFACE OF THE WELL OF SAINTS 

recurring pattern in their woven boughs. 
For though the people of the play use no 
phrase they could not use in daily life, 
we know that we are seeking to express 
what no eye has ever seen. 

Abbey Theatre, 
January 27, 1905. 



DISCOVERIES 

PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING 

The little theatrical company I write my 
plays for had come to a west of Ireland 
town, and was to give a performance in an 
old ball-room, for there was no other room 
big enough, I went there from a neigh- 
bouring country-house, and, arriving a 
little before the players, tried to open a 
window. My hands were black with dirt 
in a moment, and presently a pane of glass 
and a part of the window-frame came out in 
my hands. Everything in this room was 
half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked 
under my feet, and our new proscenium and 
the new boards of the platform looked out 
of place, and yet the room was not really 
old, in spite of the musicians' gallery over 
the stage. It had been built by some ro- 
mantic or philanthropic landlord some three 
or four generations ago, and was a memory 
of we knew not what unfinished scheme. 
£ 49 



50 DISCOVERIES 

From there I went to look for the play- 
ers, and called for information on a young 
priest, who had invited them and taken 
upon himself the finding of an audience. 
He lived in a high house with other priests, 
and as I went in I noticed with a whimsical 
pleasure a broken pane of glass in the fan- 
light over the door, for he had once told 
me the story of an old woman who a good 
many years ago quarrelled with the bishop, 
got drunk and hurled a stone through the 
painted glass. He was a clever man who 
read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his 
books had been packed in the fire-grate 
by his housekeeper, instead of the custom- 
ary view of an Italian lake or the coloured 
tissue-paper. The players, who had been 
giving a performance in a neighbouring 
town, had not yet come, or were unpacking 
their costumes and properties at the hotel 
he had recommended them. We should 
have time, he said, to go through the half- 
ruined town and to visit the convent schools 
and the cathedral, where, owing to his 
influence, two of our young Irish sculptors 
had been set to carve an altar and the heads 



DISCOVERIES 51 

of pillars. I had only heard of this work, 
and I found its strangeness and simplicity 
— one of them had been Rodin's pupil — 
could not make me forget the meretri- 
ciousness of the architecture and the com- 
mercial commonplace of the inlaid pave- 
ment. The new movement had seized on 
the cathedral midway in its growth, and 
the worst of the old and the best of the new 
were side by side without any sign of tran- 
sition. The convent school was, as other 
like places have been to me, — a long room 
in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in 
particular, — a delight to the imagination 
and the eyes. A new floor had been put 
into some ecclesiastical building and the 
light from a great mullioned window, cut 
off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of 
clean and seemingly happy children. The 
nuns, who show in their own convents, 
where they can put what they like, a love 
of what is mean and pretty, make beauti- 
ful rooms where the regulations compel 
them to do all with a few colours and a 
few flowers. I think it was that day, but 
am not sure, that I had lunch at a convent 



52 DISCOVERIES 

and told fairy stories to a couple of nuns, 
and I hope it was not mere politeness 
that made them seem to have a child's 
interest in such things. 

A good many of our audience, when 
the curtain went up in the old ball-room, 
were drunk, but all were attentive, for 
they had a great deal of respect for my 
friend, and there were other priests there. 
Presently the man at the door opposite 
to the stage strayed off somewhere and 
I took his place, and when boys came up 
offering two or three pence and asking 
to be let into the sixpenny seats, I let 
them join the melancholy crowd. The 
play professed to tell of the heroic life 
of ancient Ireland, but was really full of 
sedentary refinement and the spirituality 
of cities. Every emotion was made as 
dainty-footed and dainty-fingq^ed as 
might be, and a love and pathos where 
passion had faded into sentiment, emo- 
tions of pensive and harmless people, 
drove shadowy young men through the 
shadows of death and battle. I watched 
it with growing rage. It was not my own 



DISCOVEEIES 53 

work, but I have sometimes watched my 
own work with a rage made all the more 
salt in the mouth from being half despair. 
Why should we make so much noise about 
ourselves and yet have nothing to say that 
was not better said in that workhouse 
dormitory, where a few flowers and a few 
coloured counterpanes and the coloured 
walls had made a severe and gracious 
beauty ? Presently the play was changed 
and our comedian began to act a little 
farce, and when I saw him struggle to 
wake into laughter an audience out of 
whom the life had run as if it were water, 
I rejoiced, as I had over that broken 
window-pane. Here was something secu- 
lar, abounding, even a little vulgar, for 
he was gagging horribly, condescending 
to his audience, though not without con- 
tempt. 

We had supper in the priest's house, and 
a government official who had come down 
from Dublin, partly out of interest in this 
attempt 'to educate the people,' and partly 
because it was his holiday and it was 
necessary to go somewhere, entertained us 



54 DISCOVERIES 

with little jokes. Somebody, not, I think, 
a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of 
our race and praised the night's work, for 
the play was refined and the people really 
very attentive, and he could not under- 
stand my discontent; but presently he 
was silenced by the patter of jokes. 

I had my breakfast by myself the next 
morning, for the players had got up in the 
middle of the night and driven some ten 
miles to catch an early train to Dublin, and 
were already on their way to their shops 
and offices. I had brought the visitors' 
book of the hotel, to turn over its pages 
while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and 
found several pages full of obscenities, 
scrawled there some two or three weeks 
before, by Dublin visitors, it seemed, for 
a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. 
Nobody had thought it worth his while to 
tear out the page or blacken out the lines, 
and as I put the book away impressions 
that had been drifting through my mind 
for months rushed up into a single thought. 
'If we poets are to move the people, we 
must reintegrate the human spirit in our 



DISCOVERIES 55 

imagination. The English have driven 
away the kings, and turned the prophets 
into demagogues, and you cannot have 
health among a people if you have not 
prophet, priest and king.' 



66 DISCOVERIES 



PERSONALITY AND THE INTEL- 
LECTUAL ESSENCES 

My work in Ireland has continually set 
this thought before me : ' How can I make 
my work mean something to vigorous and 
simple men whose attention is not given 
to art but to a shop, or teaching in a 
National School, or dispensing medicine ? ' 
I had not wanted to ' elevate them ' or ' edu- 
cate them,' as these words are understood, 
but to make them understand my vision, 
and I had not wanted a large audience, 
certainly not what is called a national 
audience, but enough people for what is 
accidental and temporary to lose itself 
in the lump. In England, where there 
have been so many changing activities 
and so much systematic education, one 
only escapes from crudities and temporary 
interests among students, but here there 
is the right audience, could one but get its 
ears. I have always come to this cer- 
tainty : what moves natural men in the 



BISCOVERIES 57 

arts is what moves them in hfe, and that is, 
intensity of personal hfe, intonations that 
show them in a book or a play, the strength, 
the essential moment of a man who would 
be exciting in the market or at the dispen- 
sary door. They must go out of the 
theatre with the strength they live by 
strengthened with looking upon some 
passion that could, whatever its chosen 
way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a 
long stocking with money or move a girl's 
heart. They have not much to do with 
the speculations of science, though they 
have a little, or with the speculations of 
metaphysics, though they have a little. 
Their legs will tire on the road if there is 
nothing in their hearts but vague senti- 
ment, and though it is charming to have 
an affectionate feehng about flowers, that 
will not pull the cart out of the ditch. An 
exciting person, whether the hero of a play 
or the maker of poems, will display the 
greatest volume of personal energy, and 
this energy must seem to come out of the 
body as out of the mind. We must say 
to ourselves continually when we imagine 



58 DISCOVERIES 

a character : ' Have I given him the roots, 
as it were, of all faculties necessary for 
life?' And only when one is certain of 
that may one give him the one faculty that 
fills the imagination with joy. I even 
doubt if any play had ever a great popular- 
ity that did not use, or seem to use, the 
bodily energies of its principal actor to the 
full. Villon the robber could have de- 
lighted these Irishmen with plays and 
songs, if he and they had been born to the 
same traditions of word and symbol, but 
Shelley could not; and as men came to 
live in towns and to read printed books 
and to have many specialised activities, it 
has become more possible to produce 
Shelleys and less and less possible to pro- 
duce Villous. The last Villon dwindled 
into Robert Burns because the highest 
faculties had faded, taking the sense of 
beauty with them, into some sort of vague 
heaven and left the lower to lumber where 
they best could. In literature, partly 
from the lack of that spoken word which 
knits us to normal man, we have lost in 
personality, in our delight in the whole 



DISCOVERIES 59 

man — blood, imagination, intellect, run- 
ning together — but have found a new 
delight, in essences, in states of mind, in 
pure imagination, in all that comes to us 
most easily in elaborate music. There are 
two ways before literature — upward into 
ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, 
with Mallarme, with Maeterlinck, until at 
last, it may be, a new agreement among 
refined and studious men gives birth to a 
new passion, and what seems literature 
becomes religion; or downward, taking 
the soul with us until all is simplified and 
solidified again. That is the choice of 
choices — the way of the bird until com- 
mon eyes have lost us, or to the market 
carts ; but we must see to it that the soul 
goes with us, for the bird's song is beauti- 
ful, and the traditions of modern imagina- 
tion, growing always more musical, more 
lyrical, more melancholy, casting up now 
a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, 
are, it may be, the frenzy of those that are 
about to see what the magic hymn printed 
by the Abbe de Villars has called the Crown 
of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If 



60 DISCOVERIES 

the carts have hit our fancy we must have 
the soul tight within our bodies, for it has 
grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by 
subtle generations that it will for a long 
time be impatient with our thirst for mere 
force, mere personality, for the tumult of 
the blood. If it begin to slip away we 
must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of 
the Morning Star is better than Burns's 
beer-house — surely it was beer, not bar- 
leycorn — except at the day's weary end ; 
and it is always better than that uncom- 
fortable place where there is no beer, the 
machine shop of the realists. 



DISCOVERIES 61 



THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR 

Walter Pater says music is the type 
of all the Arts, but somebody else, I forget 
now who, that oratory is their type. You 
will side with the one or the other according 
to the nature of your energy, and I in my 
present mood am all for the man who, with an 
average audience before him, uses all means 
of persuasion — stories, laughter, tears, and 
but so much music as he can discover on the 
wings of words. I would even avoid the 
conversation of the lovers of music, who 
would draw us into the impersonal land of 
sound and colour, and I would have no one 
write with a sonata in his memory. We 
may even speak a little evil of musicians, 
having admitted that they will see before we 
do that melodious crown. We may remind 
them that the housemaid does not respect 
the piano-tuner as she does the plumber, and 
of the enmity that they have aroused among 
all poets. Music is the most impersonal of 
things, and words the most personal, and that 



62 DISCOVERIES 

is why musicians do not like words. They 
masticate them for a long time, being afraid 
they would not be able to digest them, and 
when the words are so broken and softened 
and mixed with spittle that they are not 
words any longer, they swallow them. 



DISCOVEBIES 63 



A GUITAR PLAYER 

A GIRL has been playing on the guitar. 
She is pretty, and if I didn't listen to her 
I could have watched her, and if I didn't 
watch her I could have listened. Her 
voice, the movements of her body, the 
expression of her face, all said the same 
thing. A player of a different temper 
and body would have made all different, 
and might have been delightful in some 
other way. A movement not of music only 
but of life came to its perfection. I was 
delighted and I did not know why until I 
thought, 'That is the way my people, the 
people I see in the mind's eye, play music, 
and I like it because it is all personal, as 
personal as Villon's poetry.' The little 
instrument is quite light, and the player 
can move freely and express a joy that 
is not of the fingers and the mind only but 
of the whole being ; and all the while her 
movements call up into the mind, so erect 
and natural she is, whatever is most beau- 



64 DISCOVERIES 

tiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old 
instruments were like that, even the organ 
was once a little instrument, and when it 
grew big our wise forefathers gave it to 
God in the cathedrals, where it befits Him 
to be everything. But if you sit at the 
piano, it is the piano, the mechanism, that 
is the important thing, and nothing of you 
means anything but your fingers and your 
intellect. 



DISCOVERIES 65 



THE LOOKING-GLASS 

I HAVE just been talking to a girl with 
a shrill monotonous voice and an abrupt 
way of moving. She is fresh from school, 
where they have taught her history and 
geography ^whereby a soul can be dis- 
cerned/ but what is the value of an educa- 
tion, or even in the long run of a science, 
that does not begin with the personality, 
the habitual self, and illustrate all by that ? 
Somebody should have taught her to 
speak for the most part on whatever note 
of her voice is most musical, and soften 
those harsh notes by speaking, not sing- 
ing, to some stringed instrument, taking 
note after note and, as it were, caressing 
her words a little as if she loved the sound 
of them, and have taught her after this 
some beautiful pantomimic dance, till it 
had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. 
A wise theatre might make a training in 



66 DISCOVERIES 

strong and beautiful life the fashion, 
teaching before all else the heroic discipline 
of the looking-glass, for is not beauty, even 
as lasting love, one of the most difficult of 
the arts ? 



BISCOVEEIES 67 



THE TREE OF LIFE 

We artists have taken over-much to 
heart that old commandment about seek- 
ing after the Kingdom of Heaven. Ver- 
laine told me that he had tried to translate 
'In Memoriam,' but could not because 
Tennyson was 'too noble, too Anglais, 
and, when he should have been broken- 
hearted, had many reminiscences.' About 
that time I found in some English review 
an essay of his on Shakespeare. 'I had 
once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or 
some such words, 'but I have it no longer. 
I write from memory.' One wondered in 
what vicissitude he had sold it, and for 
what money; and an image of the man 
rose in the imagination. To be his or- 
dinary self as much as possible, not a 
scholar or even a reader, that was certainly 
his pose ; and in the lecture he gave at 
Oxford he insisted 'that the poet should 
hide nothing of himself,' though he must 
speak it all with 'a care of that dignity 
which should manifest itself, if not in the 



68 DISCOVERIES 

perfection of form, at all events with an 
invisible, insensible, but effectual endeav- 
our after this lofty and severe quality, I 
was about to say this virtue.' It was this 
feeling for his own personality, his delight 
in singing his own life, even more than 
that life itself, which made the generation 
I belong to compare him to Villon. It 
was not till after his death that I under- 
stood the meaning his words should have 
had for me, for while he lived I was in- 
terested in nothing but states of mind, 
Ijrrical moments, intellectual essences. I 
would not then have been as delighted as 
I am now by that guitar player, or as 
shocked as I am now by that girl whose 
movements have grown abrupt, and whose 
voice has grown harsh by the neglect of 
all but external activities. I had not 
learned what sweetness, what rhythmic 
movement, there is in those who have 
become the joy that is themselves. With- 
out knowing it, I had come to care for 
nothing but impersonal beauty. I had 
set out on life with the thought of putting 
my very self into poetry, and had under- 



DISCOVERIES 69 

stood this as a representation of my own 
visions and an attempt to cut away the 
non-essential, but as I imagined the visions 
outside myself my imagination became 
full of decorative landscape and of still 
life. I thought of myself as something 
unmoving and silent living in the middle 
of my own mind and body, a grain of 
sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht that 
Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then 
one day I understood quite suddenly, as 
the way is, that I was seeking something 
unchanging and unmixed and always out- 
side myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was 
always out of reach, and that I myself was 
the fleeting thing that held out its hand. 
The more I tried to make my art 
dehberately beautiful, the more did I 
follow the opposite of myself, for de- 
liberate beauty is like a woman always 
desiring man's desire. Presently I found 
that I entered into myself and pictured 
myself and not some essence when I was 
not seeking beauty at all, but merely to 
lighten the mind of some burden of love 
or bitterness thrown upon it by the events 



70 DISCOVEEIES 

of life. We are only permitted to desire 
life, and all the rest should be our com- 
plaints or our praise of that exacting mis- 
tress who can awake our lips into song 
with her kisses. But we must not give her 
all, we must deceive her a little at times, 
for, as Le Sage says in Diable Boiteux the 
false lovers who do not become melan- 
choly or jealous with honest passion have 
the happiest mistresses and are rewarded 
the soonest and by the most beautiful. 
Our deceit will give us style, mastery, 
that dignity, that lofty and severe quality 
Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we 
should ascend out of common interests, the 
thoughts of the newspapers, of the market- 
place, of men of science, but only so far as 
we can carry the normal, passionate, reason- 
ing self, the personality as a whole. We 
must find some place upon the Tree of Life 
for the Phoenix nest, for the passion that is 
exaltation and the negation of the will, for 
the wings that are always upon fire, set high 
that the forked branches may keep it safe, 
yet low enough to be out of the little wind- 
tossed boughs, the quivering of the twigs. 



DISCOVERIES 71 



THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES' TALES 

An art may become impersonal because 
it has too much circumstance or too little, 
because the world is too little or too much 
with it, because it is too near the ground 
or too far up among the branches. I met 
an old man out fishing a year ago, who 
said to me, 'Don Quixote and Odysseus 
are always near to me ' ; that is true for 
me also, for even Hamlet and Lear and 
(Edipus are more cloudy.^ No play- 
wright ever has made or ever will make a 
character that will follow us out of the 
theatre as Don Quixote follows us out of 
the book, for no playwright can be wholly 
episodical, and when one constructs, bring- 
ing one's characters into complicated re- 
lations with one another, something im- 
personal comes into the story. Society, 
fate, 'tendency,' something not quite 
human, begins to arrange the characters 
and to excite into action only so much of 

1 1 had forgotten Falstaff, who is an episode in a 
chronicle play. 



72 DISCOVERIES 

their humanity as they find it necessary 
to show to one another. The common 
heart will always love better the tales that 
have something of an old wives' tale and 
that look upon their hero from every side 
as if he alone were wonderful, as a child 
does with a new penny. In plays of a 
comedy too extravagant to photograph 
life, or written in verse, the construction 
is of a necessity woven out of naked mo- 
tives and passions, but when an atmos- 
phere of modern reality has to be built up 
as well, and the tendency, or fate, or society 
has to be shown as it is about ourselves, 
the characters grow fainter, and we have 
to read the book many times or see the 
play many times before we can remember 
them. Even then they are only possible 
in a certain drawing-room and among such 
and such people, and we must carry all 
that lumber in our heads. I thought 
Tolstoi's 'War and Peace' the greatest 
story I had ever read, and yet it has 
gone from me ; even Lancelot, ever a 
shadow, is more visible in my memory 
than all its substance. 



DISCOVERIES 73 



THE PLAY OF MODERN 
MANNERS 

Of all artistic forms that have had a 
large share of the world's attention, the 
worst is the play about modern educated 
people. Except where it is superficial or 
deUberately argumentative it fills one's 
soul with a sense of commonness as with 
dust. It has one mortal ailment. It 
cannot become impassioned, that is to 
say, vital, without making somebody gush- 
ing and sentimental. Educated and well- 
bred people do not wear their hearts upon 
their sleeves, and they have no artistic 
and charming language except light per- 
siflage and no powerful language at all, 
and when they are deeply moved they 
look silently into the fireplace. Again 
and again I have watched some play of 
this sort with growing curiosity through 
the opening scene. The minor people 
argue, chaff one another, hint sometimes at 
some deeper stream of life just as we do in 



74 DISCOVERIES 

our houses, and I am content. But all 
the time I have been wondering why the 
chief character, the man who is to bear 
the burden of fate, is gushing, sentimental 
and quite without ideas. Then the great 
scene comes and I understand that he 
cannot be well-bred or self-possessed or 
intellectual, for if he were he would draw 
a chair to the fire and there would be no 
duologue at the end of the third act. 
Ibsen understood the difficulty and made 
all his characters a little provincial that 
they might not put each other out of 
countenance, and made a leading article 
sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves 
and harps in the air it was possible to 
believe them using in their moments of 
excitement, and if the play needed more 
than that, they could always do some- 
thing stupid. They could go out and hoist 
a flag as they do at the end of Little Eyolf. 
One only understands that this manner, 
deliberately adopted one doubts not, had 
gone into his soul and filled it with dust, 
when one has noticed that he could no 
longer create a man of genius. The hap- 



DISCOVERIES 75 

piest writers are those that, knowing this 
form of play to be sHght and passing, keep 
to the surface, never showing anything but 
the arguments and the persiflage of daily 
observation, or now and then, instead of 
the expression of passion, a stage picture, 
a man holding a woman's hand or sitting 
with his head in his hands in dim light 
by the red glow of a fire. It was cer- 
tainly an understanding of the slightness 
of the form, of its incapacity for the ex- 
pression of the deeper sorts of passion, 
that made the French invent the play 
with a thesis, for where there is a thesis 
people can grow hot in argument, almost 
the only kind of passion that displays itself 
in our daily life. The novel of contem- 
porary educated life is upon the other 
hand a permanent form because having 
the power of psychological description it 
can follow the thought of a man who is 
iooking into the grate. 



76 DISCOVERIES 



HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPO- 
RARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN? 

In watching a play about modern edu- 
cated people, with its meagre language 
and its action crushed into the narrow 
limits of possibility, I have found myself 
constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its 
power to move, slight as that is, from 
being able to suggest fundamental con- 
trasts and passions which romantic and 
poetical literature have shown to be 
beautiful.' A man facing his enemies 
alone in a quarrel over the purity of the 
water in a Norwegian Spa and using no 
language but that of the newspapers can 
call up into our minds, let us say, the 
passion of Coriolanus. The lovers and 
fighters of old imaginative literature are 
more vivid experiences in the soul than any- 
thing but one's own ruling passion that 
is itself riddled by their thought as by 
lightning, and even two dumb figures on 
the roads can call up all that glory. Put 



DISCOVERIES 77 

the man who has no knowledge of htera- 
ture before a play of this kind and he will 
say, as he has said in some form or other 
in every age at the first shock of naturalism, 
'What has brought me out to hear nothing 
but the words we use at home when we are 
talking of the rates ? ' And he will prefer 
to it any play where there is visible beauty 
or mirth, where life is exciting, at high tide 
as it were. It is not his fault that he will 
prefer in all likelihood a worse play al- 
though its kind may be greater, for we have 
been following the lure of science for 
generations and forgotten him and his. I 
come always back to this thought. There 
is something of an old wives' tale in fine 
literature. The makers of it are like an 
old peasant telling stories of the great 
famine or the hangings of '98 or his own 
memories. He has felt something in the 
depth of his mind and he wants to make 
it as visible and powerful to our senses as 
possible. He will use the most extrava- 
gant words or illustrations if they suit his 
purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable, 
and the more his mind is on fire or the 



78 DISCOVERIES 

more creative it is, the less will he look at 
the outer world or value it for its own sake. 
It gives him metaphors and examples, and 
that is all. He is even a little scornful of 
it, for it seems to him while the fit is on 
that the fire has gone out of it and left it 
but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but 
I am certain that every high thing was 
invented in this way, between sleeping 
and waking, as it were, and that peering 
and peeping persons are but hawkers of 
stolen goods. How else could their noses 
have grown so ravenous or their eyes so 
sharp ? 



DISCOVERIES 79 



WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT 
TIMES WAS MADE A POET 

A DESCRIPTION in the Iliad or the Odys- 
sey, unlike one in the ^Eneid or in most 
modern writers, is the swift and natural 
observation of a man as he is shaped by 
life. It is a refinement of the primary 
hungers and has the least possible of what 
is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, 
above all, never too observant, too pro- 
fessional, and when the book is closed we 
have had our energies enriched, for we 
have been in the mid-current. We have 
never seen anything Odysseus could not 
have seen while his thought was of the 
Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved 
him to desire. In the art of the greatest 
periods there is something careless and 
sudden in all habitual moods though not 
in their expression, because these moods 
are a conflagration of all the energies of 
active hfe. In primitive times the blind 
man became a poet as he became a fiddler 



80 DISCOVERIES 

in our villages, because he had to be driven 
out of activities all his nature cried for be- 
fore he could be contented with the praise 
of life. And often it is Villon or Verlaine 
with impediments plain to all, who sings 
of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets 
of coming days, when once more it will be 
possible to write as in the great epochs, 
will recognise that their sacrifice shall be 
to refuse what blindness and evil name, or 
imprisonment at the outsetting, denied 
to men who missed thereby the sting of a 
deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages 
of silver need no refusal of life, the dome of 
many-coloured glass is already shattered 
while they live. They look at life deliber- 
ately and as if from beyond life, and the 
greatest of them need suffer nothing but 
the sadness that the saints have known. 
This is their aim, and their temptation is 
not a passionate activity, but the approval 
of their fellows, which comes to them in 
full abundance only when they delight 
in the general thoughts that hold together 
a cultivated middle-class, where irrespon- 
sibiliti^s_of j)osition and poverty are lack- 



DISCOVERIES 81 

ing; the things that are more excellent 
among educated men who have pohtical 
preoccupations, Augustus Caesar's affabil- 
ity, all that impersonal fecundity which 
muddies the intellectual passions. Ben 
Jonson says in the 'Poetaster,' that even 
the best of men without Promethean fire 
is but a hollow statue, and a studious man 
will commonly forget after some forty 
winters that of a certainty Promethean 
fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may 
happen that poets will be made more often 
by their sins than by their virtues, for 
general praise is unlucky, as the villages 
know, and not merely as I imagine — for 
I am superstitious about these things — 
because the praise of all but an equal en- 
slaves and adds a pound to the ball at the 
ankle with every compliment. 

All energy that comes from the whole 
man is as irregular as the lightning, for the 
communicable and forecastable and dis- 
coverable is a part only, a hungry chicken 
under the breast of the pelican, and the 
test of poetry is not in reason but in a 
delight not different from the delight that 



82 DISCOVERIES 

comes to a man at the first coming of love 
into the heart. I knew an old man who 
had spent his whole life cutting hazel and 
privet from the paths, and in some seventy- 
years he had observed little but had many 
imaginations. He had never seen like a 
naturalist, never seen things as they are, 
for his habitual mood had been that of a 
man stirred in his affairs; and Shake- 
speare, Tintoretto, though the times were 
running out when Tintoretto painted, 
nearly all the great men of the Renais- 
sance, looked at the world with eyes like 
his. Their minds were never quiescent, 
never as it were in a mood for scientific 
observations, always an exaltation, never 
— to use known words — founded upon 
an elimination of the personal factor ; and 
their attention and the attention of those 
they worked for dwelt constantly with 
what is present to the mind in exaltation. 
I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's 
' Creation of the Milky Way,' I cannot fix 
my thoughts upon that glowing and palpi- 
tating flesh intently enough to forget, as I 
can the make-believe of a fairy tale, that 



DISCOVERIES 83 

heavy drapery hanging from a cloud, 
though I find my pleasure in King Lear 
heightened by the make-believe that comes 
upon it all when the fool says : ' This 
prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live be- 
fore his time'; — and I always find it 
quite natural, so little does logic in the 
mere circumstance matter in the finest art, 
that Richard's and Richmond's tents 
should be side by side. I saw with de- 
light The Knight of the Burning Pestle 
when Mr. Carr revived it, and found it 
none the worse because the apprentice 
acted a whole play upon the spur of the 
moment and without committing a line 
to heart. When Ben Jonson's Epicoene 
rammed a century of laughter into the two 
hours' traffic, I found with amazement 
that almost every journalist had put logic 
on the seat, where our lady imagination 
should pronounce that unjust and favour- 
ing sentence her woman's heart is ever 
plotting, and had felt bound to cherish 
none but reasonable sympathies and to 
resent the baiting of that grotesque old 
man. I have been looking over a book of 



84 DISCOVERIES 

engravings made in the eighteenth cen- 
tury from those wall-pictures of Hercula- 
neum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the 
work of journeymen copying from finer 
paintings, for the composition is always too 
good for the execution. I find in great 
numbers an indifference to obvious logic, 
to all that the eye sees at common mo- 
ments. Perseus shows Andromeda the 
death she lived by in a pool, and though the 
lovers are carefully drawn the reflection is 
upside down that we may see it the better. 
There is hardly an old master who has not 
made known to us in some like way how 
little he cares for what every fool can see 
and every knave can praise. The men who 
imagined the arts were not less supersti- 
tious in religion, understanding the spirit- 
ual relations, but not the mechanical, and 
finding nothing that need strain the throat 
in those gnats the floods of Noah and 
Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Asca- 
lon. 



BISCOVEBIES 85 



CONCERNING SAINTS AND 
ARTISTS 

I TOOK the Indian hemp with certain 
followers of St. Martin on the ground floor 
of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had 
never taken it before, and was instructed 
by a boisterous young poet, whose English 
was no better than my French. He gave 
me a little pellet, if I am not forgetting, an 
hour before dinner, and another after we 
had dined together at some restaurant. 
As we were going through the streets to 
the meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt 
suddenly that a cloud I was looking at 
floated in an immense space, and for an 
instant my being rushed out, as it seemed, 
into that space with ecstasy. I was my- 
self again immediately, but the poet was 
wholly above himself, and presently he 
pointed to one of the street lamps now 
brightening in the fading twilight, and 
cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you 
look at me with your great eye?' There 



86 DISCOVERIES 

were perhaps a dozen people already much 
excited when we arrived ; and after I had 
drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a 
pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to 
dance, but did not, as I could not remem- 
ber any steps. I sat down and closed my 
eyes; but no, I had no visions, nothing 
but a sensation of some dark shadow 
which seemed to be telling me that some 
day I would go into a trance and so out of 
my body for a while, but not yet. I 
opened my eyes and looked at some red 
ornament on the mantelpiece, and at once 
the room was full of harmonies of red, but 
when a blue china figure caught my eye 
the harmonies became blue upon the in- 
stant. I was puzzled, for the reds were 
all there, nothing had changed, but they 
were no longer important or harmonious; 
and why had the blues so unimportant but 
a moment ago become exciting and de- 
lightful ? Thereupon it struck me that 
I was seeing like a painter, and that in the 
course of the evening everyone there would 
change through every kind of artistic 
perception. 



DISCOVERIES 87 

After a while a Martinist ran towards 
me with a piece of paper on which he had 
drawn a circle with a dot in it, and point- 
ing at it with his finger he cried out, ' God, 
God ! ' Some immeasurable mystery had 
been revealed, and his eyes shone ; and at 
some time or other a lean and shabby man, 
with rather a distinguished face, showed 
me his horoscope and pointed with an 
ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. 
The boisterous poet, who was an old eater 
of the Indian hemp, had told me that it 
took one three months growing used to it, 
three months more enjoying it, and three 
months being cured of it. These men 
were in their second period; but I never 
forgot myself, never really rose above my- 
self for more than a moment, and was even 
able to feel the absurdity of that gaiety, 
an Herr Nordau among the men of genius, 
but one that was abashed at his own so- 
briety. The sky outside was beginning 
to grey when there came a knocking at the 
window shutters. Somebody opened the 
window, and a woman in evening dress, who 
was not a little bewildered to find so many 



88 DISCOVERIES 

people, was helped down into the room. 
She had been at a students' ball unknown 
to her husband, who was asleep overhead, 
and had thought to have crept home un- 
observed, but for a confederate at the win- 
dow. All those talking or dancing men 
laughed in a dreamy way ; and she, under- 
standing that there was no judgment in 
the laughter of men that had no thought 
but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, 
laughed and darted through the room and 
so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's 
rope should be own brother to that Indian 
happiness that keeps alone, were it not 
for some stray cactus, mother of as many 
dreams, immemorial impartiality. 



DISCOVERIES 89 



THE SUBJECT MATTER 
OF DRAMA 

I READ this sentence a few days ago, or 
one like it, in an obituary of Ibsen : ' Let 
nobody again go back to the old ballad 
material of Shakespeare, to murders, and 
ghosts, for what interests us on the stage is 
modern experience and the discussion of 
our interests ; ' and in another part of the 
article Ibsen was blamed because he had 
written of suicides and in other ways made 
use of 'the morbid terror of death.' 
Dramatic literature has for a long time 
been left to the criticism of journalists, 
and all these, the old stupid ones and the 
new clever ones, have tried to impress upon 
it their absorption in the life of the mo- 
ment, their delight in obvious originality 
and in obvious logic, their shrinking from 
the ancient and insoluble. The writer I 
have quoted is much more than a journal- 
ist, but he has lived their hurried life, and 
instinctively turns to them for judgment. 



90 DISCOVERIES 

He is not thinking of the great poets and 
painters, of the cloud of witnesses, who are 
there that we may become, through our 
understanding of their minds, spectators 
of the ages, but of this age. Drama is a 
means of expression, not a special subject 
matter, and the dramatist is as free to 
choose where he has a mind to, as the 
poet of ^Endymion,' or as the painter of 
Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the 
Pharisee. So far from the discussion of 
our interests and the immediate circum- 
stance of our life being the most moving to 
the imagination, it is what is old and far 
off that stirs us the most deeply. There 
is a sentence in The Marriage of Heaven 
and Hell that is meaningless until we 
understand Blake's system of correspond- 
ences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the 
best water the newest.' 

Water is experience, immediate sensa- 
tion, and wine is emotion, and it is with the 
intellect, as distinguished from imagina- 
tion, that we enlarge the bounds of ex- 
perience and separate it from all but itself, 
from illusion, from memory, and create 



DISCOVERIES 91 

among other things science and good 
journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, 
grows intoxicating and dehghtful after it 
has been enriched with the memory of old 
emotions, with all the uncounted flavours 
of old experience; and it is necessarily 
some antiquity of thought, emotions that 
have been deepened by the experiences of 
many men of genius, that distinguishes 
the cultivated man. The subject matter 
of his meditation and invention is old, and 
he will disdain a too conscious originality 
in the arts as in those matters of daily life 
where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we 
are all conservatives ' ? He is above all 
things well-bred, and whether he write 
or paint will not desire a technique that 
denies or obtrudes his long and noble 
descent. Corneille and Racine did not 
deny their masters, and when Dante 
spoke of his master Virgil there was no 
crowing of the cock. In their day imita- 
tion was conscious or all but conscious, 
and while originality was but so much the 
more a part of the man himself, so much 
the deeper because unconscious, no quick 



92 DISCOVERIES 

analysis could find out their miracle, that 
needed, it may be, generations to reveal; 
but it is our imitation that is unconscious 
and that waits the certainties of time. 
The more religious the subject matter of 
an art, the more will it be as it were sta- 
tionary, and the more ancient will be the 
emotion that it arouses and the circum- 
stances that it calls up before our eyes. 
When in the Middle Ages the pilgrim to 
St. Patrick's Purgatory found himself 
on the lake side, he found a boat made 
out of a hollow tree to ferry him to the 
cave of vision. In religious painting and 
poetry, crowns and swords of an ancient 
pattern take upon themselves new mean- 
ings, and it is impossible to separate our 
idea of what is noble from a mystic stair, 
where not men and women, but robes, 
jewels, incidents, ancient utilities float 
upward slowly over the all but sleeping 
mind, putting on emotional and spiritual 
life as they ascend until they are swallowed 
up by some far glory that they even were 
too modern and momentary to endure. 
All art is dream, and what the day is 



DISCOVEBIES 93 

done with is dreaming ripe, and what 
art has moulded rehgion accepts, and in 
the end all is in the wine cup, all is in the 
drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to 
stammer. 



94 BISCOVEBIES 



THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM 

It is not possible to separate an emotion 
or a spiritual state from the image that 
calls it up and gives it expression. Michael 
Angelo's Moses, Velasquez' Philip the 
Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call 
into life an emotion or state that vanishes 
with them because they are its only possible 
expression, and that is why no mind is more 
valuable than the images it contains. The 
imaginative writer differs from the saint 
in that he identifies himself — to the neg- 
lect of his own soul, alas ! — with the 
soul of the world, and frees himself from 
all that is impermanent in that soul, an 
ascetic not of women and wine, but of the 
newspapers. That which is permanent in 
the soul of the world upon the other hand, 
the great passions that trouble all and have 
but a brief recurring life of flower and seed 
in any man, is the renunciation of the 
saint who seeks not an eternal art, but his 
own eternity. The artist stands between 



DISCOVERIES 95 

the saint and the world of impermanent 
things, and just in so far as his mind dwells 
on what is impermanent in his sense, on 
all that 'modern experience and the dis- 
cussion of our interests,' that is to say, on 
what never recurs, as desire and hope, 
terror and weariness, spring and autumn, 
recur in varying rhythms, will his mind 
become critical, as distinguished from 
creative, and his emotions wither. He will 
think less of what he sees and more of his 
own attitude towards it, and will express 
this attitude by an essentially critical 
selection and emphasis. I am not quite 
sure of my memory, but I think that Mr. 
Ricketts has said in his book on the Prado 
that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the 
first time in painting, and we all feel the 
critic in Whistler and Degas, in Browning, 
even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art 
of all ages but the greatest. The end for 
art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence 
before an ever-changing mind of what is 
permanent in the world, or by the arousing 
of that mind itself into the very delicate 
and fastidious mood habitual with it when 



96 , DISCOVERIES 

it is seeking those permanent and recurring 
things. There is a Httle of both ecstasies 
at all times, but at this time we have a 
small measure of the creative impulse 
itself, of the divine vision, a great one 
of 'the lost traveller's dream under the 
hill,' perhaps because all the old simple 
things have been painted or written, and 
they will only have meaning for us again 
when a new race or a new civilisation 
has made us look upon all with new eye- 
sight. 



DISCOVERIES 97 



IN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH 

There is an old saying that God is a 
circle whose centre is everywhere. If 
that is true, the saint goes to the centre, 
the poet and artist to the ring where every- 
thing comes round again. The poet must 
not seek for what is still and fixed, for 
that has no life for him; and if he did, 
his style would become cold and monoto- 
nous, and his sense of beauty faint and 
sickly, as are both style and beauty to my 
imagination in the prose and poetry of 
Newman, but be content to find his 
pleasure in all that is for ever passing away 
that it may come again, in the beauty 
of woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, 
in momentary heroic passion, in what- 
ever is most fleeting, most impassioned, 
as it were, for its own perfection, most eager 
to retm'n in its glory. Yet perhaps he 
must endure the impermanent a little, 
for these things return, but not wholly, 
for no two faces are alike, and, it may 

H 



98 DISCOVERIES 

be, had we more learned eyes, no two 
flowers. Is it that all things are made 
by the struggle of the individual and 
the world, of the unchanging and the 
returning, and that the saint and the 
poet are over all, and that the poet 
has made his home in the Serpent's 
mouth ? 



DISCOVERIES 99 



THE BLACK AND THE WHITE 
ARROWS 

Instinct creates the recurring and the 
beautiful, all the winding of the serpent; 
but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake 
called it, is a drawer of the straight line, 
the maker of the arbitrary and the im- 
permanent, for no recurring spring will 
ever bring again yesterday's clock. Sanc- 
tity has its straight line also, darting 
from the centre, and with these arrows 
the many-coloured serpent, theme of all 
our poetry, is maimed and hunted. He 
that finds the white arrow shall have wis- 
dom older than the Serpent, but what of 
the black arrow ? How much knowledge, 
how heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered 
ebony rods can the soul endure ? 



100 DISCOVERIES 



HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS 

The preoccupation of our Art and 
Literature with knowledge, with the sur- 
face of hfe, with the arbitrary, with mech- 
anism, has arisen out of the root. A 
careful but not necessarily very subtle 
man could foretell the history of any 
religion if he knew its first principle, 
and that it would live long enough to fulfil 
itself. The mind can never do the same 
thing twice over, and having exhausted 
simple beauty and meaning, it passes to 
the strange and hidden, and at last must 
find its delight, having outrun its har- 
monies in the emphatic and discordant. 
When I was a boy at the art school I 
watched an older student late returned 
from Paris, with a wonder that had no 
understanding in it. He was very amor- 
ous, and every new love was the occasion 
of a new picture, and every new picture 
was uglier than its forerunner. He was 
excited about his mistress's eyebrows, as 



DISCOVERIES 101 

was fitting, but the interest of beauty had 
been exhausted by the logical energies of 
Art, which destroys where it has rummaged, 
and can but discover, whether it will or no. 
We cannot discover our subject matter 
by deliberate intellect, for when a subject 
matter ceases to move us we must go else- 
where, and when it moves us, even though 
it be 'that old ballad material of Shake- 
speare' or even 'the morbid terror of 
death,' we can laugh at reason. We must 
not ask is the world interested in this 
or that, for nothing is in question but our 
own interest, and we can understand no 
other. Our place in the Hierarchy is 
settled for us by our choice of a subject 
matter, and all good criticism is hieratic, 
delighting in setting things above one 
another, Epic and Drama above Lyric 
and so on, and not merely side by side. 
But it is our instinct and not our intellect 
that chooses. We can deliberately re- 
fashion our characters, but not our paint- 
ing or our poetry. If our characters also 
were not unconsciously refashioned so 
completely by the unfolding of the logical 



102 DISCOVERIES 

energies of Art, that even simple things 
have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, 
the Arts would not be among those things 
that return for ever. The ballads that 
Bishop Percy gathered returned in the 
Ancient Mariner and the delight in the 
world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a 
more delicate loveliness in that archaistic 
head of the young athlete down the long 
corridor to your left hand as you go into the 
British Museum. Civilisation too, will not 
that also destroy where it has loved, until 
it shall bring the simple and natural things 
again and a new Argo with all the gilding 
on her bows sail out to find another fleece ? 



DISCOVERIES 103 



THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR 

Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a 
bargain with that brown hair before the be- 
ginning of time, and it shall not be broken 
through unending time,' and it may be 
that Mistress Nature knows that we have 
lived many times, and that whatsoever 
changes and winds into itself belongs to 
us. She covers her eyes away from us, but 
she lets us play with the tresses of her 
hair. 



104 DISCOVERIES 



A TOWER ON THE APENNINES 

The other day I was walking towards 
Urbino, where I was to spend the night, 
having crossed the Apennines from San 
Sepolcro, and had come to a level place 
on the mountain- top near the journey's 
end. My friends were in a carriage some- 
where behind, on a road which was still 
ascending in great loops, and I was alone 
amid a visionary, fantastic, impossible 
scenery. It was sunset and the stormy 
clouds hung upon mountain after mountain, 
and far off on one great summit a cloud 
darker than the rest glimmered with 
lightning. Away south upon another 
mountain a mediaeval tower, with no build- 
ing near nor any sign of life, rose into the 
clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind's eye 
an old man, erect and a little gaunt, stand- 
ing in the door of the tower, while about 
him broke a windy light. He was the poet 
who had at last, because he had done so 
much for the word's sake, come to share 



DISCOVERIES 105 

in the dignity of the saint. He had 
hidden nothing of himself, but he had 
taken care of Hhat dignity . . . the per- 
fection of form . . . this lofty and severe 
quality . . . this virtue.' And though he 
had but sought it for the word's sake, or 
for a woman's praise, it had come at last 
into his body and his mind. Certainly 
as he stood there he knew how from behind 
that laborious mood, that pose, that genius, 
no flower of himself but all himself, looked 
out as from behind a mask that other 
Who alone of all men, the country-people 
say, is not a hair's breadth more nor less 
than six feet high. He has in his ears 
well-instructed voices and seeming solid 
sights are before his eyes, and not as we 
say of many a one, speaking in metaphor, 
but as this were Delphi or Eleusis, and the 
substance and the voice come to him among 
his memories which are of women's faces ; 
for was it Columbanus or another that 
wrote 'There is one among the birds that 
is perfect, and one perfect among the fish' ? 



106 DISCOVEBIES 



THE THINKING OF THE BODY 

Those learned men who are a terror 
to children and an ignominious sight in 
lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional 
humour where there is something of the 
wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, 
theologians, lawyers, men of science of 
various kinds. They have followed some 
abstract reverie, which stirs the brain 
only and needs that only, and have there- 
fore stood before the looking-glass with- 
out pleasure and never known those 
thoughts that shape the lines of the body 
for beauty or animation, and wake a 
desire for praise or for display. 

There are two pictures of Venice side 
by side in the house where I am writing 
this, a Canaletto that has little but careful 
drawing, and a not very emotional pleasure 
in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, 
where the blue water, that in the other 
stirs one so little, can make one long to 
plunge into the green depth where a cloud 



DISCOVERIES 107 

shadow falls. Neither painting could 
move us at all, if our thought did not 
rush out to the edges of our flesh, and it is 
so with all good art, whether the Victory 
of Samothrace which reminds the soles of 
our feet of swiftness, or the Odyssey 
that would send us out under the salt wind, 
or the young horsemen on the Parthenon, 
that seem happier than our boyhood ever 
was, and in our boyhood's way. Art 
bids us touch and taste and hear and 
see the world, and shrinks from what 
Blake calls mathematic form, from every 
abstract thing, from all that is of the 
brain only, from all that is not a fountain 
jetting from the entire hopes, memories, 
and sensations of the body. Its morality 
is personal, knows little of any general 
law, has no blame for Little Musgrave, 
no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems 
lighter than a breath and yet is hard and 
heavy, for if a man is not ready to face 
toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, 
his body will grow unshapely and his 
heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. 
It approved before all men those that 



108 DISCOVERIES 

talked or wrestled or tilted under the walls 
of Urbino, or sat in the wide window-seats 
discussing all things, with love ever in their 
thought, when the wise Duchess ordered 
all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme. 



DISCOVERIES 109 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY 
TO RELIGIOUS ART 

All art is sensuous, but when a man 
puts only his contemplative nature and 
his more vague desires into his art, the 
sensuous images through which it speaks 
become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are 
chosen for their distance from general 
experience, and all grows unsubstantial 
and fantastic. When imagination moves 
in a dim world like the country of sleep 
in Lovers Nocturne and 'Siren there 
winds her dizzy hair and sings,' we go 
to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. 
If we are to sojourn there that world must 
grow consistent with itself, emotion must 
be related to emotion by a system of ordered 
images, as in the Divine Comedy. It must 
grow to be sjmibolic, that is, for the soul 
can only achieve a distinct separated life 
where many related objects at once dis- 
tinguish and arouse its energies in their 
fulness. All visionaries have entered into 



110 DISCOVERIES 

such a world in trances, and all ideal art 
has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed 
to Matthew Arnold to beat his ineffectual 
wings in the void, and I only made my 
pleasure in him contented pleasure by 
massing in my imagination his recurring 
images of towers and rivers, and caves 
with fountains in them, and that one 
star of his, till his world had grown solid 
underfoot and consistent enough for the 
soul's habitation. 

But even then I lacked something to 
compensate my imagination for geographi- 
cal and historical reality, for the testimony 
of our ordinary senses, and found myself 
wishing for and trying to imagine, as I 
had also when reading Keats' Endymion, 
a crowd of believers who could put into 
all those strange sights the strength of 
their belief and the rare testimony of their 
visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, 
and I would have had Shelley a sectary 
that his revelation might have found the 
only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. 
All symbolic art should arise out of a real 
belief, and that it cannot do so in this age 



DISCOVERIES 111 

proves that this age is a road and not a 
resting-place for the imaginative arts. 
I can only understand others by myself, 
and I am certain that there are many who 
are not moved as they desire to be by 
that solitary light burning in the tower of 
Prince Athanais, because it has not entered 
into men's prayers nor lighted any through 
the sacred dark of religious contempla- 
tion. 

Ljrrical poems, when they but speak of 
emotions common to all, require not indeed 
a religious belief like the spiritual arts, but 
a life that has leisure for itself, and a 
society that is quickly stirred that our 
emotion may be strengthened by the 
emotion of others. All circumstance that 
makes emotion at once dignified and visible, 
increases the poet's power, and I think 
that is why I have always longed for some 
stringed instrument, and a listening audi- 
ence, not drawn out of the hurried streets, 
but from a life where it would be natural to 
murmur over again the singer's thought. 
When I heard Yvette Guilbert the other 
day, who has the lyre or as good, I was not 



112 DISCOVERIES 

content, for she sang among people whose 
Hfe had nothing it could share with an 
exquisite art, that should rise out of life as 
the blade out of the spearshaft, a song 
out of the mood, the fountain from its 
pool, all art out of the body, laughter from 
a happy company. I longed to make all 
things over again, that she might sing in 
some great hall, where there was no one 
that did not love life and speak of it con- 
tinually. 



DISCOVEBIES 113 



THE HOLY PLACES 

When all art was struck out of personal- 
ity, whether as in our daily business or in 
the adventure of religion, there was little 
separation between holy and common 
things, and just as the arts themselves 
passed quickly from passion to divine con- 
templation, from the conversation of 
peasants to that of princes, the one song 
remembering the drunken miller and but 
half forgetting Cambuscan bold; so did 
a man feel himself near sacred presences 
when he turned his plough from the slope 
of Cruachmaa or of Olympus. The occu- 
pations and the places known to Homer or 
to Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as 
it were, if but the fashioners' hands had 
loosened, have changed before the' poem's 
end to symbols and vanished,^Vinged and 
un weary, into the unchanging worlds where 
religion alone can discover life as well as 
peace. A man of that unbroken day could 
have all the subtlety of Shelley, and yet use 
no image unknown among ^ the common 



114 DISCOVERIES 

people, and speak no thought that was not a 
deduction from the common thought. Un- 
less the discovery of legendary knowledge 
and the returning belief in miracle, or what 
we must needs call so, can bring once more 
a new belief in the sanctity of common 
ploughland, and new wonders that reward 
no difficult ecclesiastical routine but the 
common, wayward, spirited man, we may 
never see again a Shelley and a Dickens 
in the one body, but be broken to the 
end. We have grown jealous of the body, 
and we dress it in dull unshapely clothes, 
that WG may cherish aspiration alone. 
Moliere being but the master of common 
sense lived ever in the common daylight, 
but Shakespeare could not, and Shakespeare 
seems to bring us to the very market- 
place, when we remember Shelley's dizzy 
and Landor's calm disdain of usual daily 
things. And at last we have Villiers 
de L'Isle-Adam crying in the ecstasy 
of a supreme culture, of a supreme 
refusal, 'as for living, our servants will 
do that for us.' One of the means of 
loftiness, of marmorean stillness has been 



DISCOVERIES 115 

the choice of strange and far-away places, 
for the scenery of art, but this choice has 
grown bitter to me, and there are moments 
when I cannot beheve in the reahty of 
imaginations that are not inset with the 
minute hfe of long familiar things and 
symbols and places. I have come to 
think of even Shakespeare's journeys to 
Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of 
an unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural 
interests, an unstable equilibrium of the 
whole European mind that would not have 
come had John Palaeologus cherished, despite 
that high and heady look, copied by Burne 
Jones for his Cophetua, a hearty disposition 
to fight the Turk. I am orthodox and pray 
for a resurrection of the body, and am certain 
that a man should find his Holy Land where 
he first crept upon the floor, and that famil- 
iar woods and rivers should fade into symbol 
with so gradual a change that he never dis- 
cover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he 
is beyond space, and that time alone keeps 
him from Primum Mobile, the Supernal 
Eden, and the White Rose over all. 

1906. 



POETRY AND TRADITION 



When Mr. O'Leary died I could not 
bring myself to go to his funeral, though 
I had been once his close fellow- worker, for 
I shrank from seeing about his grave so 
many whose Nationalism was different 
from anything he had taught or that I 
could share. He belonged, as did his friend 
John F. Taylor, to the romantic concep- 
tion of Irish Nationality on which Lionel 
Johnson and myself founded, so far as it 
was founded on anything but literature, 
our Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps 
his spirit, if it can care for or can see old 
friends now, will accept this apology for 
an absence that has troubled me. I 
learned much from him and much from 
Taylor, who will always seem to me the 
greatest orator I have heard ; and that 
ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an 
imaginary Ireland, in whose service I 
116 



POETRY AND TRADITION 117 

labour, will always be in many essentials 
their Ireland. They were the last to 
speak an understanding of life and Nation- 
ality, built up by the generation of Grattan, 
which read Homer and Virgil, and by the 
generation of Davis, which had been 
pierced through by the idealism of Maz- 
zini,^ and of the European revolutionists 
of the mid-century. 

O'Leary had joined the Fenian move- 
ment with no hope of success as we know, 
but because he believed such a movement 
good for the moral character of the people ; 
and had taken his long imprisonment 
without complaining. Even to the very 
end, while often speaking of his prison life, 
he would have thought it took from his 
Roman courage to describe its hardship. 
The worth of a man's acts in the moral 
memory, a continual height of mind in the 
doing of them, seemed more to him than 
their immediate result, if, indeed, the sight 

1 Rose Kavanagh, the poet, wrote to her religious 
adviser from, I think, Leitrim, where she lived, and 
asked him to get her the works of Mazzini. He replied, 
' You must mean Manzone.' 



118 POETRY AND TRADITION 

of many failures had not taken away the 
thought of success. A man was not to He, 
or even to give up his dignity, on any pa- 
triotic plea, and I have heard him say, 'I 
have but one religion, the old Persian : to 
bend the bow and tell the truth,' and again, 
'There are things a man must not do to 
save a nation,' and again, 'A man must not 
cry in public to save a nation,' and that 
we might not forget justice in the passion 
of controversy, 'There was never cause 
so bad that it has not been defended by 
good men for what seemed to them good 
reasons.' His friend had a burning and 
brooding imagination that divided men 
not according to their achievement but by 
their degrees of sincerity, and by their 
mastery over a straight and, to my thought, 
too obvious logic that seemed to him essen- 
tial to sincerity. Neither man had an 
understanding of style or of literature in 
the right sense of the word, though both 
were great readers, but because their imagi- 
nation could come to rest no place short of 
greatness, they hoped, John O'Leary es- 
pecially, for an Irish hterature of the great- 



POETRY AND TRADITION 119 

est kind. When Lionel Johnson and 
Katharine Tynan (as she was then), and I, 
myself, began to reform Irish poetry, we 
thought to keep unbroken the thread run- 
ning up to Grattan which John O'Leary 
had put into our hands, though it might 
be our business to explore new paths of the 
labyrinth. We sought to make a more 
subtle rhythm, a more organic form, than 
that of the older Irish poets who wrote in 
English, but always to remember certain 
ardent ideas and high attitudes of mind 
which were the nation itself, to our belief, 
so far as a nation can be summarised in the 
intellect. If you had asked an ancient 
Spartan what made Sparta Sparta, he 
would have answered, The Laws of Lycur- 
gus, and many Englishmen look back to 
Bunyan and to Milton as we did to Grattan 
and to Mitchell. Lionel Johnson was able 
to take up into his Art one portion of this 
tradition that I could not, for he had a 
gift of speaking political thought in fine 
verse that I have always lacked. I, on 
the other hand, was more preoccupied with 
Ireland (for he had other interests), and 



120 POETRY AND TRADITION 

took from Allingham and Walsh their 
passion for country spiritism, and from 
Ferguson his pleasure in heroic legend, and 
while seeing all in the light of European 
literature found my symbols of expression 
in Ireland. One thought often possessed 
me very strongly. New from the influ- 
ence, mainly the personal influence, of 
William Morris, I dreamed of enlarging 
Irish hate, till we had come to hate with a 
passion of patriotism what Morris and 
Ruskin hated. Mitchell had already all 
but poured some of that hate drawn from 
Carlyle, who had it of an earlier and, as 
I think, cruder sort, into the blood of Ire- 
land, and were we not a poor nation with 
ancient courage, unblackened fields and 
a barbarous gift of self-sacrifice ? Ruskin 
and Morris had spent themselves in vain 
because they had found no passion to 
harness to their thought, but here was un- 
wasted passion and precedents in the popu- 
lar memory for every needed thought and 
action. Perhaps, too, it would be possible 
to find in that new philosophy of spiritism 
coming to a seeming climax in the work of 



POETRY AND TRADITION 121 

Fredrick Myers, and in the investigations 
of uncounted obscure persons, what could 
change the country' spiritism into a rea- 
soned behef that would put its might 
into all the rest. A new belief seemed 
coming that could be so simple and de- 
monstrable and above all so mixed into 
the common scenery of the world, that it 
would set the whole man on fire and liberate 
him from a thousand obediences and 
complexities. We were to forge in Ire- 
land a new sword on our old traditional 
anvil for that great battle that must in the 
end re-establish the old, confident, joyous 
world. All the while I worked with this 
idea, founding societies that became 
quickly or slowly everything I despised. 
One part of me looked on, mischievous and 
' mocking, and the other part spoke words 
which were more and more unreal, as the 
attitude of mind became more and more 
strained and difficult. Madame Maud 
Gonne could still draw great crowds out 
of the slums by her beauty and sincerity, 
and speak to them of ' Mother Ireland with 
the crown of stars about her head.' But 



122 POETRY AND TRADITION 

gradually the political movement she was 
associated with, finding it hard to build 
up any fine lasting thing, became content 
to attack little persons and little things. 
All movements are held together more by 
what they hate than by what "they love, 
for love separates and individualises 
and quiets, but the nobler movements, 
the only movements on which literature 
can found itself, hate great and lasting 
things. All who have any old tradi- 
tions have something of aristocracy, 
but we had opposing us from the first, 
though not strongly from the first, a 
type of mind which had been without 
influence in the generation of Grattan, 
and almost without it in that of Davis, 
and which has made a new nation out of 
Ireland, that was once old and full of 
memories. 

I remember, when I was twenty years 
old, arguing, on my way home from a 
Young Ireland Society, that Ireland, with 
its hieratic Church, its readiness to accept 
leadership in intellectual things, — and 
John O'Leary spoke much of this readi- 



POETRY AND TRADITION 123 

ness,^ — its Latin hatred of middle paths 
and uncompleted arguments, could never 
create a democratic poet of the type of 
Burns, although it had tried to do so more 
than once, but that its genius would in the 
long run be aristocratic and lonely. When- 
ever I had known some old countryman, 
I had heard stories and sayings that arose 
out of an imagination that would have 
understood Homer better than The Cot- 
ter^s Saturday Night or Highland Mary, 
because it was an ancient imagination, 
where the sediment had found the time 
to settle, and I believe that the makers of 
deliberate literature could still take pas- 
sion and theme, though but little thought, 
from such as he. On some such old and 
broken stem, I thought, have all the most 
beautiful roses been grafted. 

1 1 have heard him say more than once, ' I will not 
say our people know good from bad, but I will say 
that they don't hate the good when it is pointed out 
to them, as a great many people do in England.' 



124 POETRY AND TRADITION 

II 

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, 
And the winds that blow through the starry ways ; 
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood 
Cover over and hide, for he has no part 
With the proud, majestical multitude. 

Three types of men have made all 
beautiful things. Aristocracies have 
made beautiful manners, because their 
place in the world puts them above the 
fear of life, and the countrymen have made 
beautiful stories and beliefs, because they 
have nothing to lose and so do not fear, 
and the artists have made all the rest, 
because Providence has filled them with 
recklessness. All these look backward to 
a long tradition, for, being without fear, 
they have held to whatever pleased them. 
The others being always anxious have 
come to possess little that is good in 
itself, and are always changing from thing 
to thing, for whatever they do or have 
must be a means to something else, and 
they have so little belief that anything can 
be an end in itself, that they cannot under- 



POETRY AND TRADITION 125 

stand you if you say, 'All the most valu- 
able things are useless.' They prefer the 
stalk to the flower, and believe that paint- 
ing and poetry exist that there may be in- 
struction, and love that there may be chil- 
dren, and theatres that busy men may rest, 
and holidays that busy men may go on 
being busy. At all times they fear and 
even hate the things that have worth in 
themselves, for that worth may suddenly, as 
it were a fire, consume their book of Life, 
where the world is represented by cyphers 
and symbols ; and before all else, they fear 
irreverent j oy and unserviceable sorrow. It 
seems to them, that those who have been 
freed by position, by poverty, or by the 
traditions of Art, have something terrible 
about them, a light that is unendurable to 
eyesight. They complain much of that 
commandment that we can do almost what 
we will, if we do it gaily, and think that 
freedom is but a trifling with the world. 

If we would find a company of our own 
way of thinking, we must go backward 
to turreted walls, to courts, to high rocky 
places, to little walled towns, to jesters like 



126 POETRY AND TRADITION 

that jester of Charles the Fifth who made 
mirth out of his own death ; to the Duke 
Guidobaldo in his sickness, or Duke 
Frederick in his strength, to all those who 
understood that life is not lived, if not lived 
for contemplation or excitement. 

Certainly we could not delight in that 
so courtly thing, the poetry of light love, 
if it were sad ; for only when we are gay 
over a thing, and can play with it, do we 
show ourselves its master, and have minds 
clear enough for strength. The raging 
fire and the destructive sword are portions 
of eternity, too great for the eye of man, 
wrote Blake, and it is only before such 
things, before a love like that of Tristan 
and Iseult, before noble or ennobled death, 
that the free mind permits itself aught but 
brief sorrow. That we may be free from 
all the rest, sullen anger, solemn virtue, 
calculating anxiety, gloomy suspicion, pre- 
varicating hope, we should be reborn in 
gaiety. Because there is submission in a 
pure sorrow, we should sorrow alone over 
what is greater than ourselves, nor too 
soon admit that greatness, but all that is 



POETRY AND TRADITION 127 

less than we are should stir us to some joy, 
for pure joy masters and impregnates; 
and so to world end, strength shall laugh 
and wisdom mourn. 

Ill 

In life courtesy and self-possession, and 
in the arts style, are the sensible impres- 
sions of the free mind, for both arise out 
of a deliberate shaping of all things, and 
from never being swept away, whatever the 
emotion, into confusion or dulness. The 
Japanese have numbered with heroic things 
courtesy at all times whatsoever, and 
though a writer, who has to withdraw so 
much of his thought out of his life that he 
may learn his craft, may find many his 
betters in daily courtesy, he should never 
be without style, which is but high breed- 
ing in words and in argument. He is in- 
deed the Creator of the standards of man- 
ners in their subtlety, for he alone can 
know the ancient records and be like some 
mystic courtier who has stolen the keys 
from the girdle of time, and can wander 



128 POETRY AND TRADITION 

where it please him amid the splendours 
of ancient courts. 

Sometimes, it may be, he is permitted 
the license of cap and bell, or even the 
madman's bunch of straws, but he never 
forgets or leaves at home the seal and the 
signature. He has at all times the freedom 
of the well-bred, and being bred to the 
tact of words can take what theme he 
pleases, unlike the linen drapers, who are 
rightly compelled to be very strict in their 
conversation. Who should be free if he 
were not? for none other has a contin- 
ual deliberate self -delighting happiness — 
style, 'the only thing that is immortal in 
literature,' as Sainte-Beuve has said, a 
still unexpended energy, after all that the 
argument or the story need, a still un- 
broken pleasure after the immediate end 
has been accomplished — and builds this 
up into a most personal and wilful fire, 
transfiguring words and sounds and events. 
It is the playing of strength when the day's 
work is done, a secret between a crafts- 
man and his craft, and is so inseparate in 
his nature, that he has it most of all amid 



POETRY AND TRADITION 129 

overwhelming emotion, and in the face of 
death. Shakespeare's persons, when the 
last darkness has gathered about them, 
speak out of an ecstasy that is one half the 
self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the 
last playing and mockery of the victorious 
sword, before the defeated world. 

It is in the arrangement of events as in 
the words, and in that touch of extrava- 
gance, of irony, of surprise, which is set 
there after the desire of logic has been 
satisfied and all that is merely necessary 
established, and that leaves one, not in the 
circling necessity, but caught up into the 
freedom of self-delight : it is, as it were, the 
foam upon the cup, the long pheasant's 
feather on the horse's head^^ the spread 
peacock over the pasty. If it be very 
conscious, very deliberate, as it may be in 
comedy, for comedy is more personal than 
tragedy, we call it phantasy, perhaps even 
mischievous phantasy, recognising how 
disturbing it is to all that drag a ball at the 
ankle. This joy, because it must be al- 
ways making and mastering, remains in 
the hands and in the tongue of the artist, 



130 POETBY AND TRADITION 

but with his eyes he enters upon a sub- 
missive, sorrowful contemplation of the 
great irremediable things, and he is known 
from other men by making all he handles 
like himself, and yet by the unlikeness to 
himself of all that comes before him in a 
pure contemplation. It may have been 
his enemy or his love or his cause that set 
him dreaming, and certainly the phoenix 
can but open her young wings in a flaming 
nest; but all hate and hope vanishes in 
the dream, and if his mistress brag of the 
song or his enemy fear it, it is not that 
either has its praise or blame, but that the 
twigs of the holy nest are not easily set 
afire. The verses may make his mistress 
famous as Helen or give a victory to his 
cause, not because he has been either's 
servant, but because men delight to honour 
and to remember all that have served con- 
templation. It had been easier to fight, to 
die even, for Charles's house with Marvel's 
poem in the memory, but there is no zeal 
of service that had not been an impurity 
in the pure soil where the marvel grew. 
Timon of Athens contemplates his own 



POETRY AND TRADITION 131 

end, and orders his tomb by the beachy 
margent of the flood, and Cleopatra sets 
the asp to her bosom, and theii' words move 
us because their sorrow is not their own at 
tomb or asp, but for all men's fate. That 
shaping joy has kept the sorrow pure, as it 
had kept it were the emotion love or hate, for 
the nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling 
of contraries, the extremity of sorrow, the 
extremity of joy, perfection of personahty, 
the perfection of its surrender, overflowing 
turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness; 
and its red rose opens at the meeting of the 
two beams of the cross, and at the trysting- 
place of mortal and immortal, time and 
eternity. No new man has ever plucked 
that rose, or found that trysting-place, for 
he could but come to the understanding of 
himself, to the mastery of unlocking words 
after long frequenting of the great Masters, 
hardly without ancestral memory of the like. 
Even knowledge is not enough, for the ' reck- 
lessness' Castiglione thought necessary in 
good manners is necessary in this likewise, 
and if a man has it not he will be gloomy, 
and had better to his marketing again. 



132 POETRY AND TRADITION 

IV 

When I saw John O'Leary first, every 
young catholic man who had intellectual 
ambition fed his imagination with the 
poetry of Young Ireland; and the verses 
of even the least known of its poets were 
expounded with a devout ardour at Young 
Ireland Societies and the like, and their 
birthdays celebrated. The School of 
writers I belonged to tried to found it- 
self on much of the subject-matter of this 
poetry, and, what was almost more in our 
thoughts, to begin a more imaginative 
tradition in Irish literature, by a criticism 
at once remorseless and enthusiastic. It 
was our criticism, I think, that set Clar- 
ence Mangan at the head of the Young 
Ireland poets in the place of Davis, and 
put Sir Samuel Ferguson, who had died with 
but little fame as a poet, next in the suc- 
cession. Our attacks, mine especially, on 
verse which owed its position to its moral or 
political worth, roused a resentment which 
even I find it hard to imagine to-day, and 
our verse was attacked in return, and not 



POETRY ANi> TRADITION 133 

for anything peculiar to ourselves, but for 
all that it had in common with the ac- 
cepted poetry of the world, and most of 
all for its lack of rhetoric, its refusal to 
preach a doctrine or to consider the seem- 
ing necessities of a cause. Now, after so 
many years, I can see how natural, how 
poetical, even, an opposition was, that 
shows what large numbers could not call 
up certain high feelings without accus- 
tomed verses, or believe we had not 
wronged the feeling when we did but at- 
tack the verses. I have just read in a 
newspaper that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy 
recited upon his death bed his favourite 
poem, one of the worst of the patriotic 
poems of Young Ireland, and it has brought 
all this to mind, for the opposition to our 
School claimed him as its leader. When 
I was at Siena, I noticed that the Byzan- 
tine style persisted in faces of Madonnas 
for several generations after it had given 
way to a more natural style, in the less 
loved faces of saints and martyrs. Pas- 
sion had grown accustomed to those slop- 
ing and narrow eyes, which are almost 



134 POETRY AND TRADITION 

Japanese, and to those gaunt cheeks, and 
would have thought it sacrilege to change. 
We would not, it is likely, have found 
listeners if John O'Leary, the irreproach- 
able patriot, had not supported us. It was 
as clear to him that a writer must not write 
badly, or ignore the examples of the great 
masters in the fancied or real service of a 
cause, as it was that he must not lie for it or 
grow hysterical. I believed in those days 
that a new intellectual life would begin, 
like that of Young Ireland, but more pro- 
found and personal, and that could we but 
get a few plain principles accepted, new 
poets and writers of prose would make an 
immortal music. I think I was more blind 
than Johnson, though I judge this from 
his poems rather than anything I remem- 
ber of his talk, for he never talked ideas, 
but, as was common with his generation 
in Oxford, facts and immediate impres- 
sions from life. With others this renun- 
ciation was but a pose, a superficial reac- 
tion from the disordered abundance of the 
middle century, but with him it was the 
radical life. He was in all a traditionahst, 



POETRY AND TRADITION 135 

gathering out of the past phrases, moods, 
attitudes, and dishking ideas less for their 
uncertainty than because they made the 
mind itself changing and restless. He 
measured the Irish tradition by another 
greater than itself, and was quick to feel 
any falling asunder of the two, yet at many 
moments they seemed but one in his im- 
agination. Ireland, all through his poem 
of that name, speaks to him with the voice 
of the great poets, and in Ireland Dead 
she is still mother of perfect heroism, but 
there doubt comes too. 

Can it be they do repent 
That they went, thy chivaky, 
Those sad ways magnificent ? 

And in Ways of War, dedicated to 
John O'Leary, he dismissed the belief in 
an heroic Ireland as but a dream. 



A dream ! a dream ! an ancient dream I 
Yet ere peace come to Innisfail, 
Some weapons on some field must gleam, 
Some burning glory fire the Gael. 



136 POETBT AND TRADITION 

That field may lie beneath the sun, 
Fair for the treading of an host : 
That field in realms of thought be won, 
And armed hands do their uttermost : 

Some way, to faitliful Innisfail, 
Shall come the majesty and awe 
Of martial truth, that must prevail 
To lay on all the eternal law. 

I do not think either of us saw that, as 
belief in the possibihty of armed insur- 
rection withered, the old romantic na- 
tionalism would wither too, and that the 
young would become less ready to find 
pleasure in whatever they believed to be 
literature. Poetical tragedy, and indeed 
all the more intense forms of literature, 
had lost their hold on the general mass of 
men in other countries as life grew safe, 
and the sense of comedy which is the 
social bond in times of peace as tragic 
feeling is in times of war, had become the 
inspiration of popular art. I always knew 
this, but I believed that the memory of 
danger, and the reality of it seemed near 
enough sometimes, would last long enough 
to give Ireland her imaginative oppor- 



POETRY AND TRADITION 137 

tunity. I could not foresee that a new 
class, which had begun to rise into power 
under the shadow of Parnell, would change 
the nature of the Irish movement, which, 
needing no longer great sacrifices, nor 
bringing any great risk to individuals, 
could do without exceptional men, and 
those activities of the mind that are 
founded on the exceptional moment.* 
John O'Leary had spent much of his 
thought in an unavailing war with the 
agrarian party, believing it the root of 
change, but the fox that crept into the 
badger's hole did not come from there. 
Power passed to small shop-keepers, to 
clerks, to that very class who had seemed 
to John O'Leary so ready to bend to the 

1 A small political organiser told me once that he 
and a certain friend got together somewhere in Tip- 
perary a great meeting of farmers for O'Leary on his 
coming out of prison, and O'Leary had said at it : 
' The landlords gave us some few leaders, and I like 
them for that, and the artisans have given us great 
numbers of good patriots, and so I like them best : 
but you I do not like at all, for you have never given 
us anyone.' I have known but one that had his 
moral courage, and that was a woman with beauty 
to give her courage and self-possession. 



138 POETRY AND TRADITION 

power of others, to men who had risen 
above the traditions of the countryman, 
without learning those of cultivated life 
or even educating themselves, and who 
because of their poverty, their ignorance, 
their superstitious piety, are much sub- 
ject to all kinds of fear. Immediate vic- 
tory, immediate utility, became every- 
thing, and the conviction, which is in all 
who have run great risks for a cause's 
sake, in the O'Learys and Mazzinis as in 
all rich natures, that life is greater than 
the cause, withered, and we artists, who 
are the servants not of any cause but of 
mere naked life, and above all of that life 
in its nobler forms, where joy and sorrow 
are one. Artificers of the Great Moment, 
became as elsewhere in Europe protesting 
individual voices. Ireland's great mo- 
ment had passed, and she had filled no 
roomy vessels with strong sweet wine, 
where we have filled our porcelain jars 
against the coming winter. 

August, 1907. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

OF 

JOHN M. SYNGE'S POEMS AND 
TRANSLATIONS 

* The Lonely returns to the Lonely, the Divine to 
the Divinity.* — Proclvs 



While this work was passing through 
the press Mr. J. M. Synge died. Upon 
the morning of his death one friend of his 
and mine, though away in the country, 
felt the burden of some heavy event, 
without understanding where or for whom 
it was to happen; but upon the same 
morning one of my sisters said, 'I think 
Mr. Synge will recover, for last night I 
dreamed of an ancient galley labouring 
in a storm and he was in the galley, and 
suddenly I saw it run into bright sunlight 
and smooth sea, and I heard the keel grate 
upon the sand.' The misfortune was for 
139 



140 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF SYNGE 

the living certainly, that must work on, 
perhaps in vain, to magnify the minds and 
hearts of our young men, and not for the 
dead that, having cast off the ailing body, 
is now, as I believe, all passionate and fiery, 
an heroical thing. Our Daimon is as 
dumb as was that of Socrates, when they 
brought in the hemlock; and if we speak 
among ourselves, it is of the thoughts 
that have no savour because we cannot hear 
his laughter, of the work more difficult be- 
cause of the strength he has taken with him, 
of the astringent joy and hardness that was 
in all he did, and of his fame in the world. 

II 

In his Preface he speaks of these poems 
as having been written during the last 
sixteen or seventeen years, though the 
greater number were written very recently, 
and many during his last illness. An 
Epitaph and On an Anniversary show 
how early the expectation of death came 
to him, for they were made long ago. But 
the book as a whole is a farewell, written 



PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF SYNGE 141 

when life began to slip from him. He was 
a reserved man, and wished no doubt by 
a vague date to hide when still living what 
he felt and thought, from those about him. 
I asked one of the nurses in the hospital 
where he died if he knew he was dying, 
and she said, ' He may have known it for 
months, but he would not have spoken 
of it to anyone.' Even the translations 
of poems that he has made his own by 
putting them into that melancholy dialect 
of his, seem to express his emotion at the 
memory of poverty and the approach of 
death. The whole book is of a kind al- 
most unknown in a time when lyricism 
has become abstract and impersonal. 

Ill 

Now and then in history some man 
will speak a few simple sentences which 
never die, because his life gives them energy 
and meaning. They affect us as do the 
last words of Shakespeare's people that 
gather up into themselves the energy of 
elaborate events, and they in their turn 



142 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF STNGE 

put strange meaning into half-forgotten 
things and accidents, Uke cries that 
reveal the combatants in some dim battle. 
Often a score of words will be enough, as 
when we repeat to ourselves, 'I am a ser- 
vant of the Lord God of War and I under- 
stand the lovely art of the Muses,' all that 
remains of a once famous Greek poet and 
sea rover. And is not that epitaph Swift 
made in Latin for his own tomb more im- 
mortal than his pamphlets, perhaps than his 
great allegory ? ' He has gone where fierce 
indignation will lacerate his heart no more.' 
I think this book too has certain sentences, 
fierce or beautiful or melancholy that will be 
remembered in our history, having behind 
their passion his quarrel with ignorance, 
and those passionate events, his books. 

But for the violent nature that strikes brief 
fire in A Question, hidden though it was 
under much courtesy and silence, his genius 
had never borne those lion cubs of his. He 
could not have loved had he not hated, nor 
honoured had he not scorned ; though his 
hatred and his scorn moved him but seldom, 
as I think, for his whole nature was lifted up 



PBEFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF STNGE 143 

into a vision of the world, where hatred 
played with the grotesque and love became 
an ecstatic contemplation of noble life. 

He once said to me, 'We must unite 
asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy; two of these 
have often come together, but not all three : ' 
and the strength that made him delight 
in setting the hard virtues by the soft, the 
bitter by the sweet, salt by mercury, the 
stone by the elixir, gave him a hunger for 
harsh facts, for ugly surprising things, for 
all that defies our hope. In The Passing 
of the Shee he is repelled by the contem- 
plation of a beauty too far from life to 
appease his mood ; and in his own work, 
benign images ever present to his soul must 
have beside them malignant reality, and the 
greater the brightness, the greater must the 
darkness be. Though like 'Usheen after 
the Fenians ' he remembers his master and 
his friends, he cannot put from his mind 
coughing and old age and the sound of 
the bells. The old woman in The Riders 
to the Sea, in mourning for her six fine 
sons, mourns for the passing of all beauty 
^nd strength, while the drunken woman 



14-1: PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF STNGE 

of The Tinker^ s Wedding is but the more 
drunken and the more thieving because she 
can remember great queens. And what is 
it but desire of ardent Hfe, Hke that of 
Usheen for his 'golden salmon of the 
sea, cleen hawk of the air/ that makes the 
young girls of The Playboy of the West- 
ern World prefer to any peaceful man 
their eyes have looked upon, a seeming 
murderer? Person after person in these 
laughing, sorrowful, heroic plays is, Hhe 
like of the little children do be listening 
to the stories of an old woman, and do be 
dreaming after in the dark night it's in 
grand houses of gold they are, with speckled 
horses to ride, and do be waking again in 
a short while and they destroyed with the 
cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe, and 
the starved ass braying in the yard.' 

IV 

It was only at the last in his unfinished 
Deirdre of the Sorrows that his mood 
changed. He knew some twelve months 
ago that he was dying, though he told no 



PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION OF STNGE 145 

one about it but his betrothed, and he gave 
all his thought to this play, that he might 
finish it. Sometimes he would despond 
and say that he could not; and then his 
betrothed would act it for him in his sick 
room, and give him heart to write again. 
And now by a strange chance, for he began 
the play before the last failing of his health, 
his persons awake to no disillusionment but 
to death only, and as if his soul already 
thirsted for the fiery fountains there is 
nothing grotesque, but beauty only. 



He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, 
never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seek- 
ing sympathy but in this book's momentary 
cries : all folded up in brooding intellect, 
knowing nothing of new books and news- 
papers, reading the great masters alone ; and 
he was but the more hated because he gave 
his country what it needed, an unmoved 
mind where there is a perpetual last day, a 
trumpeting, and coming up to judgment. 

April 4, 1909. 



J. M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND 
OF HIS TIME 



On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I 
was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when my 
lecture was over I was given a telegram 
which said, 'Play great success.' It had 
been sent from Dublin after the second act 
of The Playboy of the Western World, 
then being performed for the first time. 
After one in the morning, my host brought 
to my bedroom this second telegram, 'Au- 
dience broke up in disorder at the word 
shift.' I knew no more until I got the 
Dublin papers on my way from Belfast 
to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On the 
Monday night no word of the play had 
been heard. About forty young men had 
sat on the front seats of the pit, and 
stamped and shouted and blown trumpets 
from the rise to the fall of the curtain. 
On the Tuesday night also the forty young 
men were there. They wished to silence 
146 



STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 147 

what they considered a slander upon Ire- 
land's womanhood. Irish women would 
never sleep under the same roof with a 
young man without a chaperon, nor ad- 
mire a murderer, nor use a word like 
' shift ' ; nor could anyone recognise the 
countrymen and women of Davis and Kick- 
ham in these poetical, violent, grotesque 
persons, who used the name of God so freely, 
and spoke of all things that hit their fancy. 
A patriotic journalism which had seen 
in Synge's capricious imagination the 
enemy of all it would have young men be- 
lieve, had for years prepared for this 
hour, by that which is at once the greatest 
and most ignoble power of journalism, the 
art of repeating a name again and again 
with some ridiculous or evil association. 
The preparation had begun after the 
first performance of TJie Shadow of the 
Glen, Synge's first play, with an asser- 
tion made in ignorance but repeated in 
dishonesty, that he had taken his fable 
and his characters, not from his own mind 
nor that profound knowledge of cot and 
curragh he was admitted to possess, but 



V 



148 STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' 
Some spontaneous dislike had been but 
natural, for genius like his can but slowly, 
amid what it has of harsh and strange, set 
forth the nobility of its beauty, and the 
depth of its compassion; but the frenzy 
that would have silenced his master-work 
was, like most violent things artificial, 
the defence of virtue by those that have but 
little, which is the pomp and gallantry of 
journalism and its right to govern the world. 
As I stood there watching, knowing well 
that I saw the dissolution of a school of patri- 
otism that held sway over my youth, Synge 
came and stood beside me, and said, ' A young 
doctor has just told me that he can hardly 
keep himself from jumping on to a seat, 
and pointing out in that howling mob those 
whom he is treating for venereal disease.' 

II 

Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral 
simplicity which can give to actions the 
lasting influence that style alone can give 
to words, had understood that a country 



SYNGE AND THE IBELAND OF HIS TIME 149 

which has no national institutions must 
show its young men images for the affec- 
tions, although they be but diagrams of 
what it should be or may be. He and his 
school imagined the Soldier, the Orator, 
the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and 
above all the Peasant ; and these, as cele- 
brated in essay and songs and stories, 
possessed so many virtues that no matter 
how England, who, as Mitchell said, 'had 
the ear of the world,' might slander us, 
Ireland, even though she could not come 
at the world's other ear, might go her way 
unabashed. But ideas and images which 
have to be understood and loved by large 
numbers of people, must appeal to no rich 
personal experience, no patience of study, 
no delicacy of sense ; and if at rare moments 
some Memory of the Dead can take its 
strength from one; at all other moments 
manner and matter will be rhetorical, con- 
ventional, sentimental; and language, 
because it is carried beyond life perpetu- 
ally, will be as wasted as the thought, 
with unmeaning pedantries and silences, 
and a dread of all that has salt and savour. 



150 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

After a while, in a land that has given 
itself to agitation over-much, abstract 
thoughts are raised up between men's 
minds and Nature, who never does the 
same thing twice, or makes one man like 
another, till minds, whose patriotism is 
perhaps great enough to carry them to the 
scaffold, cry down natural impulse with 
the morbid persistence of minds unsettled 
by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied 
with the nation's future, with heroes, 
poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, 
but only as these things are understood 
by a child in a national school, while a 
secret feeling that what is so unreal needs 
continual defence makes them bitter and 
restless. They are like some state which 
has only paper money, and seeks by pun- 
ishments to make it buy whatever gold 
can buy. They no longer love, for only 
life is loved, and at last, a generation is 
like an hysterical woman who will make 
unmeasured accusations and believe im- 
possible things, because of some logical 
deduction from a solitary thought which 
has turned a portion of her mind to stone. 



STNGE AND THE IBELAND OF HIS TIME 151 



III 

Even if what one defends be true, an 
attitude of defence, a continual apology, 
whatever the cause, makes the mind bar- 
ren because it kills intellectual innocence; 
that delight in what is unforeseen, and 
in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere 
drifting hither and thither that must come 
before all true thought and emotion. A 
zealous Irishman, especially if he lives 
much out of Ireland, spends his time in a 
never-ending argument about Oliver Crom- 
well, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebel- 
lion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, 
and ends by substituting a traditional 
casuistry for a country; and if he be a 
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has 
professors, schoolmasters, letter-writing 
priests and the authors of manuals to 
make the meshes fine, comes between him 
and English literature, substituting ar- 
guments and hesitations for the excite- 
ment at the first reading of the great poets 
which should be a sort of violent imagina- 



152 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

tive puberty. His hesitations and argu- 
ments may have been right, the Cathohc 
philosophy may be more profound than 
Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement 
vision; but none the less do we lose life 
by losing that recklessness Castiglione 
thought necessary even in good manners, 
and offend our Lady Truth, who would 
never, had she desired an anxious court- 
ship, have digged a well to be her parlour. 
I admired, though we were always quar- 
relling, J. F. Taylor, the orator, who died 
just before the first controversy over these 
plays. It often seemed to me that when 
he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one 
got that sense of surprise that comes when 
a man has said what is unforeseen because 
it is far from the common thought, and yet 
obvious because when it has been spoken, 
the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll 
back and reveal forgotten sights and let 
loose lost passions. I have never heard 
him speak except in some Irish literary or 
political society, but there at any rate, as 
in conversation, I found a man whose life 
was a ceaseless reverie over the religious 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 153 

and political history of Ireland. He saw 
himself pleading for his country before an 
invisible jury, perhaps of the great dead, 
against traitors at home and enemies 
abroad, and a sort of frenzy in his voice 
and the moral elevation of his thoughts 
gave him for the moment style and music. 
One asked oneself again and again, 'Why 
is not this man an artist, a man of genius, 
a creator of some kind?' The other day 
under the influence of memory, I read 
through his one book, a life of Owen Roe 
O'Neill, and found there no sentence de- 
tachable from its context because of wis- 
dom or beauty. Everything was argued 
from a premise; and wisdom and style, 
whether in life or letters, come from the 
presence of what is self-evident, from that 
which requires but statement, from what 
Blake called 'naked beauty displayed.' 
The sense of what was unforeseen and 
obvious, the rolling backward of the gates, 
had gone with the living voice, with the 
nobility of will that made one understand 
what he saw and felt in what was now 
but argument and logic. I found myself 



154 SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

in the presence of a mind like some noisy 
and powerful machine, of thought that was 
no part of wisdom but the apologetic of a 
moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of 
leaf and twig, of words with no more of 
salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit 
professor of literature, or of any other who 
does not know that there is no lasting 
writing which does not define the quality, 
or carry the substance of some pleasure. 
How can one, if one's mind be full of ab- 
stractions and images created not for their 
own sake but for the sake of party, even 
if there were still the need, make pictures 
for the mind's eye and sounds that delight 
the ear, or discover thoughts that tighten 
the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the 
flesh, and so stand like St. Michael with 
the trumpet that calls the body to resur- 
rection ? 

IV 

Young Ireland had taught a study of 
our history with the glory of Ireland for 
event, and this for lack, when less than 



STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 155 

Taylor studied, of comparison with that 
of other countries wrecked the historical 
instinct. An old man with an academic 
appointment, who was a leader in the 
attack upon Synge sees in the eleventh 
century romance of Deirdre a retelling of 
the first five-act tragedy outside the classic 
languages, and this tragedy from his de- 
scription of it was certainly written on the 
Elizabethan model ; while an allusion to a 
copper boat, a marvel of magic like Cin- 
derella's slipper, persuades him that the 
ancient Irish had forestalled the modern 
dockyards in the making of metal ships. 
The man who doubted, let us say, our 
fabulous ancient kings running up to 
Adam, or found but mythology in some 
old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted 
the authority of Scripture. Above all no 
man was so ignorant, that he had not by 
rote familiar arguments and statistics to 
drive away amid familiar applause all 
those had they but found strange truth 
in the world or in their mind, whose know- 
ledge has passed out of memory and 
become an instinct of hand or eye. There 



156 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

was no literature, for literature is a child 
of experience always, of knowledge never ; 
and the nation itself, instead of being a 
dumb struggling thought seeking a mouth 
to utter it or hand to show it, a teeming 
delight that would re-create the world, 
had become, at best, a subject of know- 
ledge. 

V 

Taylor always spoke with confidence, 
though he was no determined man, being 
easily flattered or jostled from his way; 
and this, putting as it were his fiery heart 
into his mouth, made him formidable. And 
I have noticed that all those who speak the 
thoughts of many, speak confidently, 
while those who speak their own thoughts 
are hesitating and timid, as though they 
spoke out of a mind and body grown sen- 
sitive to the edge of bewilderment among 
many impressions. They speak to us 
that we may give them certainty, by see- 
ing what they have seen; and so it is, 
that enlargement of experience does not 



STNQEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1.57 

come from those oratorical thinkers, or 
from those decisive rhythms that move 
large numbers of men, but from writers 
that seem by contrast as feminine as the 
soul when it explores in Blake's picture 
the recesses of the grave, carrying its faint 
lamp trembling and astonished ; or as the 
Muses who are never pictured as one- 
breasted Amazons, but as women needing 
protection. Indeed, all art which appeals to 
individual man and awaits the confirma- 
tion of his senses and his reveries, seems 
when arrayed against the moral zeal, the 
confident logic, the ordered proof of jour- 
nalism, a trifling, impertinent, vexatious 
thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his 
carpet in the way of a marching army. 

VI 

I attack things that are as dear to many 
as some holy image carried hither and 
thither by some broken clan, and can but 
say that I have felt in my body the affec- 
tions I disturb, and believed that if I 
could raise them into contemplation I 



158 STNGE AND TUB IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

would make possible a literature, that, 
finding its subject-matter all ready in 
men's minds, would be, not as ours is, an 
interest for scholars, but the possession of a 
people. I have founded societies with this 
aim, and was indeed founding one in 
Paris when I first met with J. M. Synge, 
and I have known what it is to be changed 
by that I would have changed, till I 
became argumentative and unmannerly, 
hating men even in daily life for their 
opinions. And though I was never con- 
vinced that the anatomies of last year's 
leaves are a living forest, nor thought a 
continual apologetic could do other than 
make the soul a vapour and the body a 
stone ; nor believed that literature can be 
made by anything but by what is still 
blind and dumb within ourselves, I have 
had to learn how hard in one who lives 
where forms of expression and habits of 
thought have been born, not for the 
pleasure of begetting but for the public 
good, is that purification from insincerity, 
vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the 
discovery of style. But it became possible 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 159 

to live when I had learnt all I had not 
learnt in shaping words, in defending 
Synge against his enemies, and knew 
that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gra- 
cious thoughts, whether in life or letters, 
are but love-children. 

Synge seemed by nature unfitted to 
think a political thought, and with the 
exception of one sentence, spoken when I 
first met him in Paris, that implied some 
sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot re- 
member that he spoke of politics or showed 
any interest in men in the mass, or in any 
subject that is studied through abstractions 
and statistics. Often for months together 
he and I and Lady Gregory would see no 
one outside the Abbey Theatre, and that 
life, lived as it were in a ship at sea, suited 
him, for unlike those whose habit of mind 
fits them to judge of men in the mass, he 
was wise in judging individual men, and as 
wise in dealing with them as the faint 
energies of ill-health would permit ; but of 
their political thoughts he long understood 
nothing. One night when we were still 
producing plays in a little hall, certain 



160 SYNGEANB THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

members of the Company told him that 
a play on the Rebellion of '98 would be a 
great success. After a fortnight he brought 
them a scenario which read like a chapter 
out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protes- 
tant and a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, 
and there quarrel about religion, abusing 
the Pope or Queen Elizabeth and Henry 
VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to 
be ravished by the soldiers, the other by 
the rebels. At last one woman goes out 
because she would sooner any fate than 
such wicked company. Yet, I doubt if 
he would have written at all if he did not 
write of Ireland, and for it, and I know that 
he thought creative art could only come 
from such preoccupation. Once, when 
in later years, anxious about the edu- 
cational effect of our movement, I pro- 
posed adding to the Abbey Company a 
second Company to play international 
drama, Synge, who had not hitherto 
opposed me, thought the matter so im- 
portant that he did so in a formal letter. 

I had spoken of a German municipal 
theatre as my model, and he said that the 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 161 

municipal theatres all over Europe gave 
fine performances of old classics, but did 
not create (he disliked modern drama for 
its sterility of speech, and perhaps ignored 
it), and that we would create nothing if we 
did not give all our thoughts to Ireland 
Yet in Ireland he loved only what was 
wild in its people, and in 'the grey and 
wintry sides of many glens.' All the 
rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, 
read of in leading articles, all that came 
from education, all that came down from 
Young Ireland — though for this he had 
not lacked a little sympathy — first 
wakened in him perhaps that irony which 
runs through all he wrote, but once awak- 
ened, he made it turn its face upon the 
whole of life. The women quarrelling in 
the cave would not have amused him, if 
something in his nature had not looked 
out on most disputes, even those wherein 
he himself took sides, with a mischievous 
wisdom. He told me once that when he 
lived in some peasant's house, he tried to 
make those about him forget that he was 
there, and it is certain that he was silent in 



162 8TNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

any crowded room. It is possible that 
low vitality helped him to be observant 
and contemplative, and made him dislike, 
even in solitude, those thoughts which 
unite us to others, much as we all dislike, 
when fatigue or illness has sharpened the 
nerves, hoardings covered with advertise- 
ments, the fronts of big theatres, big 
London hotels, and all architecture which 
has been made to impress the crowd. 
What blindness did for Homer, lameness 
for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint 
you will, bad health did for him by making 
him ask no more of hfe than that it should 
keep him living, and above all perhaps by 
concentrating his imagination upon one 
thought, health itself. I think that all 
noble things are the result of warfare; 
great nations and classes, of warfare in 
the visible world, great poetry and philos- 
ophy, of invisible warfare, the division of 
a mind within itself, a victory, the sacrifice 
of a man to himself. I am certain that 
my friend's noble art, so full of passion 
and heroic beauty, is the victory of a man 
who in poverty and sickness created from 



8YNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 163 

the delight of expression, and in the 
contemplation that is born of the minute 
and delicate arrangement of images, happi- 
ness, and health of mind. Some early 
poems have a morbid melancholy, and he 
himself spoke of early work he had de- 
stroyed as morbid, for as yet the crafts- 
manship was not fine enough to bring the 
artist's joy which is of one substance with 
that of sanctity. In one poem he waits at 
some street corner for a friend, a woman 
perhaps, and while he waits and gradually 
understands that nobody is coming, sees 
two funerals and shivers at the future; 
and in another written on his twenty-fifth 
birthday, he wonders if the twenty-five 
years to come shall be as evil as those gone 
by. Later on, he can see himself as but a 
part of the spectacle of the world and mix 
into all he sees that flavour of extrava- 
gance, or of humour, or of philosophy, 
that makes one understand that he con- 
templates even his own death as if it were 
another's and finds in his own destiny but 
as it were a projection through a burning 
glass of that general to men. There is in 



164 SYNGEANB THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

the creative joy an acceptance of what life 
brings, because we have understood the 
beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of 
death for what it takes away, which 
arouses within us, through some sympathy 
perhaps with all other men, an energy so 
noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and 
mock, in the terror or the sweetness of our 
exaltation, at death and oblivion. 

In no modern writer that has written 
of Irish life before him, except it may 
be Miss Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent, 
was there anything to change a man's 
thought about the world or stir his moral 
nature, for they but play with pictures, 
persons and events, that whether well or 
ill observed are but an amusement for the 
mind where it escapes from meditation, 
a child's show that makes the fables of 
his art as significant by contrast as some 
procession painted on an Egyptian wall; 
for in these fables, an intelligence, on 
which the tragedy of the world had been 
thrust in so few years, that Life had no 
time to brew her sleepy drug, has spoken of 
the moods that are the expression of its 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 165 

wisdom. All minds that have a wisdom 
come of tragic reality seem morbid to 
those that are accustomed to writers who 
have not faced reality at all; just as 
the saints, with that Obscure Night of the 
Soul, which fell so certainly that they 
numbered it among spiritual states, one 
among other ascending steps, seem morbid 
to the rationalist and the old-fashioned 
Protestant controversialist. The thought 
of journalists, like that of the Irish novel- 
ists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for 
it has not risen to that state where either 
is possible, nor should we call it happy; 
for who would have sought happiness, if 
happiness were not the supreme attain- 
ment of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of 
the ascetic, or imagined it above the 
cheerful newspapers, above the clouds? 

VII 

Not that Synge brought out of the 
struggle with himself any definite philos- 
ophy, for philosophy in the common mean- 
ing of the word is created out of an anxiety 



166 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

for sympathy or obedience, and he was that 
rare, that distinguished, that most noble 
thing, which of all things still of the 
world is nearest to being sufficient to 
itself, the pure artist. Sir Philip Sid- 
ney complains of those who could hear 
'sweet tunes' (by which he understands 
could look upon his lady) and not be 
stirred to 'ravishing delight.' 

'Or if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with 

wit, 
As with sententious Ups to set a title vain on it ; 
Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in 

Wonder's schools 
To be, in tilings past bonds of wit, fools if they be 

not fools!' 

Ireland for three generations has been 
like those churlish logicians. Every- 
thing is argued over, everything has to 
take its trial before the dull sense and the 
hasty judgment, and the character of 
the nation has so changed that it hardly 
keeps but among country people, or 
where some family tradition is still stub- 
born, those lineaments that made Borrow 
cry out as he came from among the Irish 



STNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 167 

monks, his friends and entertainers for all 
his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, 
mother of the bravest soldiers and of the 
most beautiful women ! ' It was, as I 
believe, to seek that old Ireland which 
took its mould from the duellists and 
scholars of the eighteenth century and 
from generations older still, that Synge re- 
turned again and again to Aran, to Kerry, 
and to the wild Blaskets. 

VIII 

'When I got up this morning, ' he writes, 
after he had been a long time in Innismaan, 
'I found that the people had gone to 
Mass and latched the kitchen door from the 
outside, so that I could not open it to give 
myself light. 

'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire 
with a curious feeling that I should be 
quite alone in this little cottage. I am 
so used to sitting here with the people that 
I have never felt the room before as a 
place where any man might live and work 
by himself. After a while as I waited, 



168 STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

with just light enough from the chimney 
to let me see the rafters and the greyness 
of the walls, I became indescribably 
mournful, for I felt that this little corner 
on the face of the world, and the people 
who live in it, have a peace and dignity 
from which we are shut for ever.' This 
life, which he describes elsewhere as the 
most primitive left in Europe, satisfied 
some necessity of his nature. Before 
I met him in Paris he had wandered over 
much of Europe, listening to stories in 
the Black Forest, making friends with 
servants and with poor people, and this 
from an aesthetic interest, for he had 
gathered no statistics, had no money to 
give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of 
the poor, being content to pay for the 
pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon 
the fiddle. He did not love them the 
better because they were poor and miser- 
able, and it was only when he found In- 
nismaan and the Blaskets, where there is 
neither riches nor poverty, neither what 
he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor 'the 
squalor of the poor' that his writing lost 



SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 169 

its old morbid brooding, that he found 
his genius and his peace. Here were 
men and women who under the weight 
of their necessity Hved, as the artist 
lives, in the presence of death and child- 
hood, and the great affections and the 
orgiastic moment when life outleaps its 
limits, and who, as it is always with 
those who have refused or escaped the 
trivial and the temporary, had dignity and 
good manners where manners mattered. 
Here above all was silence from all our 
great orator took delight in, from formi- 
dable men, from moral indignation, from 
the 'sciolist' who 'is never sad,' from all 
in modern life that would destroy the 
arts; and here, to take a thought from 
another playwright of our school, he 
could love Time as only women and 
great artists do and need never sell it. 

IX 

As I read The Aran Islands right 
through for the first time since he showed 
it me in manuscript, I come to understand 



170 SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

how much knowledge of the real life 
of Ireland went to the creation of a 
world which is yet as fantastic as the 
Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story 
of The Playboy, of The Shadow of the 
Glen; here is the ghost on horseback 
and the finding of the young man's body 
of Riders to the Sea, numberless ways 
of speech and vehement pictures that had 
seemed to owe nothing to observation, 
and all to some overflowing of himself, or 
to some mere necessity of dramatic con- 
struction. I had thought the violent 
quarrels of The Well of the Saints came 
from his love of bitter condiments, but 
here is a couple that quarrel all day long 
amid neighbours who gather as for a play. 
I had defended the burning of Christy 
Mahon's leg on the ground that an artist 
need but make his characters self-consist- 
ent, and yet, that too was observation, 
for 'although these people are kindly 
towards each other and their children, 
they have no sympathy for the suffering 
of animals, and little sympathy for pain 
when the person who feels it is not in 



8YNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 171 

danger.' I had thought it was in the 
wantonness of fancy Martin Dhoul accused 
the smith of plucking his hving ducks, but 
a few lines farther on, in this book where 
moral indignation is unknown, I read, 
'Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I 
find all the women of the place down on 
their knees plucking the feathers from 
live ducks and geese.' 

He loves all that has edge, all that is 
salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the 
hand, all that heightens the emotions 
by contest, all that stings into life the 
sense of tragedy ; and in this book, unlike 
the plays where nearness to his audience 
moves him to mischief, he shows it without 
thought of other taste than his. It is so 
constant, it is all set out so simply, so nat- 
urally, that it suggests a correspondence 
between a lasting mood of the soul and 
this life that shares the harshness of rocks 
and wind. The food of the spiritual- 
minded is sweet, an Indian scripture says, 
but passionate minds love bitter food. 
Yet he is no indifferent observer, but is 
certainly kind and sympathetic to all 



172 SYNGE AND TEE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

about him. When an old and aihng man, 
dreading the coming winter, cries at his 
leaving, not thinking to see him again; 
and he notices that the old man's mitten 
has a hole in it where the palm is accus- 
tomed to the stick, one knows that it is 
with eyes full of interested affection as 
befits a simple man and not in the curiosity 
of study. When he had left the Blaskets 
for the last time, he travelled with a lame 
pensioner who had drifted there, why 
heaven knows, and one morning having 
missed him from the inn where they were 
staying, he believed he had gone back 
to the island, and searched everywhere and 
questioned everybody, till he understood 
of a sudden that he was jealous as though 
the island were a woman. 

The book seems dull if you read much 
at a time, as the later Kerry essays do not, 
but nothing that he has written recalls so 
completely to my senses the man as he 
was in daily life ; and as I read, there are 
moments when every line of his face, 
every inflection of his voice, grows so 
clear in memory that I cannot realise that 



8TNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 173 

he is dead. He was no nearer when we 
walked and talked than now while I read 
these unarranged, unspeculating pages, 
wherein the only life he loved with his 
whole heart reflects itself as in the still 
water of a pool. Thought comes to him 
slowly, and only after long seemingly 
unmeditative watching, and when it 
comes (and he had the same character in 
matters of business), it is spoken without 
hesitation and never changed. His con- 
versation was not an experimental thing, 
an instrument of research, and this made 
him silent ; while his essays recall events, 
on which one feels that he pronounces no 
judgment even in the depth of his own 
mind, because the labour of Life itself 
had not yet brought the philosophic gen- 
eralisation, which was almost as much his 
object as the emotional generalisation 
of beauty. A mind that generalises 
rapidly, continually prevents the experi- 
ence that would have made it feel and see 
deeply, just as a man whose character is 
too complete in youth seldom grows into 
any energy of moral beauty. Synge had 



174 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

indeed no obvious ideals, as these are 
understood by young men, and even as 
I think disUked them, for he once com- 
plained to me that our modern poetry was 
but the poetry 'of the lyrical boy,' and 
this lack makes his art have a strange 
wildness and coldness, as of a man born 
in some far-off spacious land and time. 



There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, 
like Shelley, who have impressive personali- 
ties, active wills and all their faculties at 
the service of the will ; but he belonged to 
those who like Wordsworth, like Coleridge, 
like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little 
personality, so far as the casual eye can 
see, little personal will, but fiery and brood- 
ing imagination. I cannot imagine him 
anxious to impress, or convince in any com- 
pany, or saying more than was sufficient 
to keep the talk circling. Such men have 
the advantage that all they write is a part 
of knowledge, but they are powerless 
before events and have often but one 



8TNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 175 

visible strength, the strength to reject from 
life and thought all that would mar their 
work, or deafen them in the doing of it; 
and only this so long as it is a passive act. 
If Synge had married young or taken some 
profession, I doubt if he would have 
written books or been greatly interested 
in a movement like ours ; but he refused 
various opportunities of making money 
in what must have been an almost un- 
conscious preparation. He had no life 
outside his imagination, little interest in 
anything that was not its chosen subject. 
He hardly seemed aware of the existence 
of other writers. I never knew if he 
cared for work of mine, and do not re- 
member that I had from him even a 
conventional compliment, and yet he had 
the most perfect modesty and simplicity in 
daily intercourse, self-assertion was im- 
possible to him. On the other hand, he 
was useless amidst sudden events. He 
was much shaken by the Playboy riot; 
on the first night confused and excited, 
knowing not what to do, and ill before 
many days, but it made no difference 



176 SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

in his work. He neither exaggerated out 
of defiance nor softened out of timidity. 
He wrote on as if nothing had happened, 
altering The Tinker^s Wedding to a 
more unpopular form, but writing a beau- 
tiful serene Deirdre, with, for the first 
time since his Riders to the Sea, no touch 
of sarcasm or defiance. Misfortune shook 
his physical nature while it left his intellect 
and his moral nature untroubled. The 
external self, the mask, the persona, was 
a shadow, character was all. 



XI 



He was a drifting silent man full of 
hidden passion, and loved wild islands, 
because there, set out in the light of day, 
he saw what lay hidden in himself. There 
is passage after passage in which he dwells 
upon some moment of excitement. He 
describes the shipping of pigs at Kilronan 
on the North Island for the English market : 
'when the steamer was getting near, the 
whole drove was moved down upon the 
slip and the curraghs were carried out 



8YNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 177 

close to the sea. Then each beast was 
caught in its turn and thrown on its side, 
while its legs were hitched together in a 
single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, 
by which it could be carried. 

'Probably the pain inflicted was not 
great, yet the animals shut their eyes and 
shrieked with almost human intonations, 
till the suggestion of the noise became 
so intense that the men and women who 
were merely looking on grew wild with 
excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn 
foamed at the mouth and tore each other 
with their teeth. 

* After a while there was a pause. The 
whole slip was covered with a mass of 
sobbing animals, with here and there a 
terrified woman crouching among the 
bodies and patting some special favourite, 
to keep it quiet while the curraghs were 
being launched. Then the screaming be- 
gan again while the pigs were carried 
out and laid in their places, with a waist- 
coat tied round their feet to keep them 
from damaging the canvas. They seemed 
to know where they were going, and 



178 STNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

looked up at me over the gunnel with an 
ignoble desperation that made me shudder 
to think that I had eaten this whimpering 
flesh. When the last curragh went out, 
I was left on the slip with a band of 
women and children, and one old boar 
who sat looking out over the sea. 

' The women were over-excited, and when 
I tried to talk to them they crowded round 
me and began jeering and shrieking at me 
because I am not married. A dozen 
screamed at a time, and so rapidly that 
I could not understand all they were say- 
ing, yet I was able to make out that they 
were taking advantage of the absence of 
their husbands to give me the full volume 
of their contempt. Some little boys who 
were listening threw themselves down, 
writhing with laughter among the sea- 
weed, and the young girls grew red and 
embarrassed and stared down in the surf.' 
The book is full of such scenes. Now 
it is a crowd going by train to the Parnell 
celebration, now it is a woman cursing 
her son who made himself a spy for the 
police, now it is an old woman keening at a 



SYNGEAND TEE IBELAND OF HIS TIME 179 

funeral. Kindred to his delight in the 
harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the 
life there, in the wind and in the mist, 
there is always delight in every moment 
of excitement, whether it is but the 
hysterical excitement of the women over 
the pigs, or some primary passion. Once 
indeed, the hidden passion instead of 
finding expression by its choice among the 
passions of others shows itself in the 
most direct way of all, that of dream. 
'Last night,' he writes, at Innismaan, 
'after walking in a dream among buildings 
with strangely intense light on them, I 
heard a faint jhythm of music beginning 
far away on some stringed instrument. 

' It came closer to me, gradually increas- 
ing in quickness and volume with an irre- 
sistibly definite progression. When it was 
quite near the sound began to move in my 
nerves and blood, to urge me to dance with 
them. 

'I knew that if I yielded I would be 
carried away into some moment of terrible 
agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, 
holding my knees together with my hands. 



180 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

' The music increased continually, sound- 
ing like the strings of harps tuned to a 
forgotten scale, and having a resonance as 
searching as the strings of the 'cello. 

'Then the luring excitement became 
more powerful than my will, and my 
limbs moved in spite of me. 

' In a moment I swept away in a whirl- 
wind of notes. My breath and my 
thoughts and every impulse of my body 
became a form of the dance, till I could not 
distinguish between the instrument or 
the rhythm and my own person or con- 
sciousness. 

' For a while it seemed an excitement that 
was filled with joy; then it grew into an 
ecstasy where all existence was lost in the 
vortex of movement. I could not think 
that there had been a life beyond the 
whirling of the dance. 

' Then with a shock, the ecstasy turned 
to agony and rage. I struggled to free 
myself but seemed only to increase the 
passion of the steps I moved to. When 
I shrieked I could only echo the notes of 
the rhythm. 



SYNGEAND THE IBELAND OF HIS TIME 181 

' At last, with a movement of uncontroll- 
able frenzy I broke back to consciousness 
and awoke. 

' I dragged myself trembling to the 
window of the cottage and looked out. 
The moon was glittering across the bay 
and there was no sound anywhere on the 
island.' 

XII 

In all drama which would give direct 
expression to reverie, to the speech of the 
soul with itself, there is some device that 
checks the rapidity of dialogue. When 
(Edipus speaks out of the most vehement 
passions, he is conscious of the presence 
of the chorus, men before whom he must 
keep up appearances, ' children latest born 
of Cadmus' line' who do not share his 
passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. 
We listen to reports and discuss them, 
taking part as it were in a council of state. 
Nothing happens before our eyes. The 
dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesser 
degree of that of Corneille and Racine, 



182 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

depends, as contrasted with the troubled 
Hfe of Shakespearean drama, on an almost 
even speed of dialogue, and on a so 
continuous exclusion of the animation 
of common life, that thought remains 
lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, 
upon whose stage everything may happen, 
even the blinding of Gloster, and who 
has no formal check except what is im- 
plied in the slow, elaborate structure of 
blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an 
often encumbering Euphuism, and by 
such a loosening of his plot as will give 
his characters the leisure to look at life 
from without. Maeterlinck — to name the 
first modern of the old way who comes to 
mind — reaches the same end, by choosing 
instead of human beings persons who are 
as faint as a breath upon a looking-glass, 
symbols who can speak a language slow 
and heavy with dreams because their 
own life is but a dream. Modern drama, 
on the other hand, which accepts the tight- 
ness of the classic plot, while expressing life 
directly, has been driven to make indirect 
its expression of the mind, which it leaves 



8TNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 183 

to be inferred from some common-place 
sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordi- 
nary life ; and this is, I believe, the cause of 
the perpetual disappointment of the hope 
imagined this hundred years that France 
or Spain or Germany or Scandinavia will 
at last produce the master we await. 

The divisions in the arts are almost all 
in the first instance technical, and the 
great schools of drama have been divided 
from one another by the form or the metal 
of their mirror, by the check chosen for 
the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the 
check that suited his temperament in an 
elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and 
Aran. The cadence is long and medita- 
tive, as befits the thought of men who are 
much alone, and who when they meet in 
one another's houses — as their way is at 
the day's end — listen patiently, each man 
speaking in turn and for some little time, 
and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning 
of the words and in their sound. Their 
thought, when not merely practical, is as 
full of traditional wisdom and extravagant 
pictures as that of some iEschylean chorus, 



184 STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

and no matter what the topic is, it is as 
though the present were held at arm's 
length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for 
the speaker serves his own delight, though 
doubtless he would tell you that like Raft- 
ery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the 
company's sake. A medicinal manner of 
speech too, for it could not even express, 
so little abstract it is and so rammed with 
life, those worn generalisations of national 
propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest 
story you'd hear any place from Dundalk 
to Ballinacree with great queens in it, 
making themselves matches from the start 
to the end, and they with shiny silks on 
them. . . I've a grand story of the great 
queens of Ireland, with white necks on 
them the like of Sarah Casey, and fine 
arms would hit you a slap. .... What 
good am I this night, God help me ? 
What good are the grand stories I have 
when it's few would listen to an old woman, 
few but a girl maybe would be in great fear 
the time her hour was come, or little child 
wouldn't be sleeping with the hunger on 
a cold night.' That has the flavour of 



STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 185 

Homer, of the Bible, of Villon, while Cer- 
vantes would have thought it sweet in the 
mouth though not his food. This use of 
Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, 
and by Lady Gregory, who had it already 
in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and by 
Dr. Hyde in those first translations he has 
not equalled since, has done much for 
National dignity. When I was a boy I 
was often troubled and sorrowful because 
Scottish dialect was capable of noble use, 
but the Irish of obvious roystering humour 
only ; and this error fixed on my imagina- 
tion by so many novelists and rhymers 
made me listen badly. Synge wrote down 
words and phrases wherever he went, and 
with that knowledge of Irish which made 
all our country idioms easy to his hand, 
found it so rich a thing, that he had begun 
translating into it fragments of the great 
literatures of the world, and had planned 
a complete version of The Imitation of 
Christ. It gave him imaginative richness 
and yet left to him the sting and tang of 
reality. How vivid in his translation from 
Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look 



186 SYNGE AND THE III ELAND OF UIS TIME 

out of them would bring folly from a great 
scholar.' More vivid surely than any- 
thing in Swinburne's version, and how 
noble those words which are yet simple 
country speech, in which his Petrarch 
mourns that death came upon Laura just 
as time was making chastity easy, and 
the day come when 'lovers may sit to- 
gether and say out all things are in their 
hearts,' and 'my sweet enemy was making 
a start, little by little, to give over her 
great wariness, the way she was wringing 
a sweet thing out of my sharp sorrow.' 

XIII 

Once when I had been saying that 
though it seemed to me that a conventional 
descriptive passage encumbered the action 
at the moment of crisis, I liked The 
Shadow of the Glen better than Riders 
to the Sea, that is, for all the nobility of its 
end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive 
in suffering, and had quoted from Mat- 
thew Arnold's introduction to Empedocles 
on Etna, Synge answered, 'It is a curious 



SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 187 

thing that The Riders to the Sea succeeds 
with an EngHsh but not with an Irish 
audience, and The Shadow of the Glen, 
which is not Hked by an EngHsh audience, 
is always Hked in Ireland, though it 
is disliked there in theory.' Since then 
The Riders to the Sea has grown into 
great popularity in Dublin, partly because 
with the tactical instinct of an Irish mob, 
the demonstrators against The Playboy 
both in the press and in the theatre, where 
it began the evening, selected it for ap- 
plause. It is now what Shelley's Cloud 
was for many years a comfort to those who 
do not like to deny altogether the genius 
they cannot understand. Yet I am certain 
that, in the long run, his grotesque plays 
with their lyi'ic beauty, their violent 
laughter. The Playboy of the Western 
World most of all, will be loved for hold- 
ing so much of the mind of Ireland. 
Synge has written of The Playboy, 'any- 
one who has lived in real intimacy with the 
Irish peasantry will know that the wildest 
sayings in this play are tame indeed com- 
pared with the fancies one may hear at any 



188 STNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carra- 
roe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, 
the most beautiful expression in drama of 
that Irish fantasy, which overflowing 
through all Irish Literature that has come 
out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic 
Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf 
with the sober Norse account) is the un- 
broken character of Irish genius. In 
modern days this genius has delighted in 
mischievous extravagance, like that of 
the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 
'There are three things that I hate, the 
devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms 
that are waiting for my body, my children, 
who are waiting for my wealth and care 
neither for my body nor my soul : Oh, 
Christ hang all in the same noose ! ' I 
think those words were spoken with a de- 
light in their vehemence that took out of 
anger half the bitterness with all the gloom. 
An old man on the Aran Islands told me 
the very tale on which The Playboy 
is founded, beginning with the words, 'If 
any gentleman has done a crime we'll hide 
him. There was a gentleman that killed 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 189 

his father, and I had him in my own house 
six months till he got away to America.' 
Despite the solemnity of his slow speech 
his eyes shone as the eyes must have shone 
in that Trinity College branch of the Gaelic 
League which began every meeting with 
prayers for the death of an old Fellow of 
College who disliked their movement, or 
as they certainly do when patriots are tell- 
ing how short a time the prayers took to 
the killing of him. I have seen a crowd, 
when certain Dublin papers had wrought 
themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so 
possessed by what seemed the very genius 
of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked 
to find some feathered heel among the 
cobble stones. Part of the delight of 
crowd or individual is always that some- 
body will be angry, somebody take the 
sport for gloomy earnest. We are mock- 
ing at his solemnity, let us therefore so hide 
our malice that he may be more solemn 
still, and the laugh run higher yet. Why 
should we speak his language and so wake 
him from a dream of all those emotions 
which men feel because they should, and 



190 SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

not because they must ? Our minds, being 
sufficient to themselves, do not wish for 
victory but are content to elaborate our 
extravagance, if fortune aid, into wit or 
lyric beauty, and as for the rest 'There 
are nights when a king like Conchobar 
would spit upon his arm-ring and queens 
will stick out their tongues at the rising 
moon.' This habit of the mind has made 
Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the 
most celebrated makers of comedy to our 
time, and if it has sounded plainer still in 
the conversation of the one, and in some 
few speeches of the other, that is but be- 
cause they have not been able to turn oiit 
of their plays an alien trick of zeal picked 
up in struggling youth. Yet, in Synge's 
plays also, fantasy gives the form and not 
the thought, for the core is always as in all 
great art, an over-powering vision of cer- 
tain virtues, and our capacity for sharing 
in that vision is the measure of our delight. 
Great art chills us at first by its coldness or 
its strangeness, by what seems capricious, 
and yet it is from these qualities it has au- 
thority, as though it had fed on locust and 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 191 

wild honey. The imaginative writer shows 
us the world as a painter does his picture, 
reversed in a looking-glass that we may see 
it, not as it seems to eyes habit has made 
dull, but as we were Adam and this the 
first morning; and when the new image 
becomes as little strange as the old we 
shall stay with him, because he has, be- 
sides, the strangeness, not strange to him, 
that made us share his vision, sincerity 
that makes us share his feeling. 

To speak of one's emotions without fear 
or moral ambition, to come out from under 
the shadow of other men's minds, to forget 
their needs, to be utterly oneself, that is all 
the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief 
and man-slayer, is as immortal in their 
eyes, and illustrates in the cry of his ruin 
as great a truth as Dante in abstract 
ecstasy, and touches our compassion more. 
All art is the disengaging of a soul from 
place and history, its suspension in a beau- 
tiful or terrible light, to await the Judg- 
ment, and yet, because all its days were 
a Last Day, judged already. It may show 
the crimes of Italy as Dante did, or Greek 



192 SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

mythology like Keats, or Kerry and Gal- 
way villages, and so vividly that ever after 
I shall look at all with like eyes, and yet 
I know that Cino da Pistoia thought 
Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, 
that those country men and women are 
neither so lovable nor so lawless as 'mine 
author sung it me ' ; that I have added to 
my being, not my knowledge. 

XIV 

I wrote the most of these thoughts in 
my diary on the coast of Normandy, and 
as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, 
and thereupon doubted for a day the foun- 
dation of my school. Here I saw the places 
of assembly, those cloisters on the rock's 
summit, the church, the great halls where 
monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at 
meals, beautiful from ornament or propor- 
tion. I remembered ordinances of the 
Popes forbidding drinking-cups with stems 
of gold to these monks who had but a bare 
dormitory to sleep in. Even when imagin- 
ing, the individual had taken more from 



8TNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 193 

his fellows and his fathers than he gave; 
one man finishing what another had begun ; 
and all that majestic fantasy, seeming 
more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke 
nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to 
announce whether past or yet to come an 
heroic temper of social men, a bondage of 
adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought 
more patiently and I saw that what had 
made these but as one and given them for 
a thousand years the miracles of their 
shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, 
was not a condescension to knave or dolt, 
an impoverishment of the common thought 
to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead 
language and a communion in whatever, 
even to the greatest saint, is of incredible 
difficulty. Only by the substantiation of 
the soul I thought, whether in literature 
or in sanctity, can we come upon those 
agreements, those separations from all else 
that fasten men together lastingly; for 
while a popular and picturesque Burns 
and Scott can but create a province, and 
our Irish cries and grammars serve some 
passing need. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, 



194 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 

Goethe and all who travel in their road 
with however poor a stride define races 
and create everlasting loyalties. Synge, 
like all of the great kin, sought for the race, 
not through the eyes or in history, or even 
in the future, but where those monks 
found God, in the depths of the mind, and 
in all art like his, although it does not 
command — indeed because it does not — 
may lie the roots of far-branching events. 
Only that which does not teach, which 
does not cry out, which does not persuade, 
which does not condescend, which does not 
explain, is irresistible. It is made by men 
who expressed themselves to the full, and 
it works through the best minds ; whereas 
the external and picturesque and declama- 
tory writers, that they may create kilts 
and bagpipes and newspapers and guide- 
books, leave the best minds empty, and in 
Ireland and Scotland, England runs into 
the hole. It has no array of arguments 
and maxims, because the great and the 
simple (and the Muses have never known 
which of the two most pleases them) need 
their deliberate thought for the day's work, 



SYNGEAND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 195 

and yet will do it worse if they have not 
grown into or found about them, most 
perhaps in the minds of women, the noble- 
ness of emotion associated with the scenery 
and events of their country by those great 
poets who have dreamed it in solitude, and 
who to this day in Europe are creating 
indestructible spiritual races, like those 
religion has created in the East. 

September 14th, 1910, 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 

I DID not find a word in the printed 
criticism of Synge's Deirdre of the Sor- 
rows about the quahties that made certain 
moments seem to me the noblest tragedy, 
and the play was judged by what seemed 
to me but wheels and pulleys necessary 
to the effect, but in themselves nothing. 

Upon the other hand, those who spoke 
to me of the play never spoke of these 
wheels and pulleys, but if they cared at all 
for the play, cared for the things I cared 
for. One's own world of painters, of 
poets, of good talkers, of ladies who de- 
light in Ricard's portraits or Debussey's 
music, all those whose senses feel in- 
stantly every change in our mother the 
moon, saw the stage in one way ; and those 
others who look at plays every night, who 
tell the general playgoer whether this play 
or that play is to his taste, saw it in a way 
so different that there is certainly some 
body of dogma — whether in the instincts 
196 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 197 

or in the memory, pushing the ways apart. 
A printed criticism, for instance, found but 
one dramatic moment, that when Deirdre 
in the second act overhears her lover say 
that he may grow weary of her; and not 
one — if I remember rightly — chose for 
praise or explanation the third act which 
alone had satisfied the author, or contained 
in any abundance those sentences that were 
quoted at the fall of the curtain and for 
days after. 

Deirdre and her lover, as Synge tells the 
tale, returned to Ireland, though it was 
nearly certain they would die there, because 
death was better than broken love, and at 
the side of the open grave that had been dug 
for one and would serve for both, quarrelled, 
losing all they had given their life to keep. 
' Is it not a hard thing that we should miss 
the safety of the grave and we trampling 
its edge?' That is Deirdre's cry at the 
outset of a reverie of passion that mounts 
and mounts till grief itself has carried her 
beyond grief into pure contemplation. 
Up to this the play has been a Master's 
unfinished work, monotonous and melan- 



198 THE TRAGIC THEATRE 

choly, ill-arranged, little more than a 
sketch of what it would have grown to, 
but now I listened breathless to sentences 
that may never pass away, and as they 
filled or dwindled in their civility of sorrow, 
the player, whose art had seemed clumsy 
and incomplete, like the writing itself, 
ascended into that tragic ecstasy which 
is the best that art — perhaps that life 
— can give. And at last when Deirdre, 
in the paroxysm before she took her life, 
touched with compassionate fingers him 
that had killed her lover, we knew that the 
player had become, if but for a moment, 
the creature of that noble mind which had 
gathered its art in waste islands, and we 
too were carried beyond time and persons 
to where passion, living through its thou- 
sand purgatorial years, as in the wink of 
an eye, -becomes wisdom ; and it was as 
though we too had touched and felt and 
seen a disembodied thing. 

One dogma of the printed criticism is 
that if a play does not contain definite 
character, its constitution is not strong 
enough for the stage, and that the dra- 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 199 

matic moment is always the contest of 
character with character. 

In poetical drama there is, it is held, an 
antithesis between character and lyric 
poetry, for lyric poetry — however much 
it move you when read out of a book — 
can, as these critics think, but encumber 
the action. Yet when we go back a few 
centuries and enter the great periods of 
drama, character grows less and sometimes 
disappears, and there is much lyric feeling, 
and at times a lyric measure will be wrought 
into the dialogue, a flowing measure that 
had well-befitted music, or that more 
lumbering one of the sonnet. Suddenly 
it strikes us that character is continu- 
ously present in comedy alone, and that 
there is much tragedy, that of Corneille, i 
that of Racine, that of Greece and Rome, 
where its place is taken by passions and 
motives, one person being jealous, another 
full of love or remorse or pride or anger. 
In writers of tragi-comedy (and Shake- 
speare is always a writer of tragi-comedy) 
there is indeed character, but we notice 
that it is in the moments of comedy that 



200 THE TRAGIC THEATRE 

character is defined, in Hamlet's gaiety- 
let us say ; while amid the great moments, 
when Timon orders his tomb, when Ham- 
let cries to Horatio 'absent thee from 
felicity awhile,' when Anthony names 
'Of many thousand kisses the poor last,' 
all is lyricism, unmixed passion, 'the 
integrity of fire.' Nor does character 
ever attain to complete definition in these 
lamps ready for the taper, no matter how 
circumstantial and gradual the opening 
of events, as it does in Falstaff who has no 
passionate purpose to fulfill, or as it does 
in Henry the Fifth whose poetry, never 
touched by lyric heat, is oratorical; nor 
when the tragic reverie is at its height do 
we say, 'How well that man is realised, I 
should know him were I to meet him in the 
street,' for it is always ourselves that we see 
upon the stage, and should it be a tragedy 
of love we renew, it may be, some loyalty 
of our youth, and go from the theatre with 
our eyes dim for an old love's sake. 

I think it was while rehearsing a trans- 
lation of Les Fourberies de Scqpin in 
Dublin, and noticing how passionless it 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 201 

all was, that I saw what should have been 
plain from the first line I had written, that 
tragedy must always be a drowning and 
breaking of the dykes that separate man 
from man, and that it is upon these dykes 
comedy keeps house. But I was not cer- 
tain of the site (one always doubts when 
one knows no testimony but one's own) ; 
till somebody told me of a certain letter of 
Congreve's. He describes the external 
and superficial expressions of 'humour' 
on which farce is founded and then defines 
' humour ' itself, the foundation of comedy 
as a 'singular and unavoidable way of 
doing anything peculiar to one man only, 
by which his speech and actions are dis- 
tinguished from all other men,' and adds 
to it that 'passions are too powerful in the 
sex to let humour have its course,' or as I 
would rather put it, that you can find but 
little of what we call character in un- 
spoiled youth, whatever be the sex, for 
as he indeed shows in another sentence, it 
grows with time like the ash of a burning 
stick, and strengthens towards middle life 
till there is little else at seventy years. 



202 THE TRAGIC THEATRE 

Since then I have discovered an antago- 
nism between all the old art and our new- 
art of comedy and understand why I hated 
at nineteen years Thackeray's novels and 
the new French painting. A big picture 
of cocottes sitting at little tables outside 
a caf6, by some follower of Manet's, was 
exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy 
while I was a student at a life class there, 
and I was miserable for days. I found no 
desirable place, no man I could have wished 
to be, no woman I could have loved, no 
Golden Age, no lure for secret hope, no 
adventure with myself for theme out of 
that endless tale I told myself all day long. 
Years after I saw the Olympia of Manet at 
the Luxembourg and watched it without 
hostility indeed, but as I might some in- 
comparable talker whose precision of ges- 
ture gave me pleasure, though I did not un- 
derstand his language . I returned to it again 
and again at intervals of years, saying to my- 
self , ' some day I will understand ' ; and yet, 
it was not until Sir Hugh Lane brought 
the Eva Gonzales to Dublin, and I had said 
to myself, 'How perfectly that woman is 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 203 

realised as distinct from all other women 
that have lived or shall live ' that I under- 
stood I was carrying on in my own mind 
that quarrel between a tragedian and a 
comedian which the Devil on Two Sticks 
in Le Sage showed to the young man who 
had climbed through the window. 

There is an art of the flood, the art of 
Titian when his Ariosto, and his Bacchus 
and Ariadne, give new images to the dreams 
of youth, and of Shakespeare when he 
shows us Hamlet broken away from life 
by the passionate hesitations of his reverie. 
And we call this art poetical, because we 
must bring more to it than our daily mood 
if we would take our pleasure ; and be- 
cause it delights in picturing the moment 
of exaltation, of excitement, of dreaming 
(or in the capacity for it, as in that still face 
of Ariosto's that is like some vessel soon 
to be full of wine). And there is an art 
that we call real, because character can 
only express itself perfectly in a real world, 
being that world's creature, and because we 
understand it best through a delicate dis- 
crimination of the senses which is but en- 



204 THE TTtAGIC THEATRE 

tire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold 
and crystalline. 

We may not find either mood in its 
purity, but in mainly tragic art one dis- 
tinguishes devices to exclude or lessen 
character, to diminish the power of that 
daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear 
perception. If the real world is not alto- 
gether rejected, it is but touched here and 
there, and into the places we have left empty 
we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, 
images that remind us of vast passions, 
the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras 
that haunt the edge of trance ; and if we 
are painters, we shall express personal emo- 
tion through ideal form, a symbolism han- 
dled by the generations, a mask from whose 
eyes the disembodied looks, a style that 
remembers many masters, that it may es- 
cape contemporary suggestion ; or we shall 
leave out some element of reality as in 
Byzantine painting, where there is no 
mass, nothing in relief, and so it is that in 
the supreme moment of tragic art there 
comes upon one that strange sensation 
as though the hair of one's head stood up. 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 205 

And when we love, if it be in the excitement 
of youth, do we not also, that the flood may 
find no stone to convulse, no wall to nar- 
row it, exclude character or the signs of it 
by choosing that beauty which seems un- 
earthly because the individual woman is 
lost amid the labyrinth of its lines as though 
life were trembling into stillness and silence, 
or at last folding itself away ? Some little 
irrelevance of line, some promise of char- 
acter to come, may indeed put us at our ease, 
' give more interest ' as the humour of the 
old man with the basket does to Cleo- 
patra's dying; but should it come as we 
had dreamed in love's frenzy to our dying 
for that woman's sake, we would find that 
the discord had its value from the tune. 

Nor have we chosen illusion in choosing 
the outward sign of that moral genius that 
lives among the subtlety of the passions, 
and can for her moment make her of the one 
mind with great artists and poets. In the 
studio we may indeed say to one another 
'character is the only beauty,' but when 
we choose a wife, as when we go to the 
gymnasium to be shaped for woman's eyes, 



206 TEE TRAGIC THEATRE 

we remember academic form, even though 
we enlarge a Httle the point of interest and 
choose ''a painter's beauty," finding it the 
more easy to beheve in the fire because it 
has made ashes. 

When we look at the faces of the old 
tragic paintings, whether it is in Titian 
or in some painter of medieval China, we 
find there sadness and gravity, a cer- 
tain emptiness even, as of a mind that 
waited the supreme crisis (and indeed it 
seems at times as if the graphic art, unlike 
poetry which sings the crisis itself, were 
the celebration of waiting). Whereas in 
modern art, whether in Japan or Europe, 
' vitality ' (is not that the great word of the 
studios?), the energy, that is to say, which 
is under the command of our common mo- 
ments, sings, laughs, chatters or looks its 
busy thoughts. 

Certainly we have here the Tree of 
Life and that of the knowledge of Good and 
Evil which is rooted in our interests, and 
if we have forgotten their differing vir- 
tues it is surely because we have taken 
delight in a confusion of crossing branches. 



THE TRAGIC THEATRE 207 

Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner of 
dykes, the confounder of understanding, 
moves us by setting us to reverie, by allur- 
ing us almost to the intensity of trance. 
The persons upon the stage, let us say, 
greaten till they are humanity itself. We 
feel our minds expand convulsively or 
spread out slowly like some moon-brightened 
image-crowded sea. That which is before 
our eyes perpetually vanishes and returns 
again in the midst of the excitement it 
creates, and the more enthralling it is, the 
more do we forget it. 

August, 1910. 



JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOR 

There is a portrait of John Shawe- 
Taylor by a celebrated painter in the 
Dublin Municipal Gallery, but painted in 
the midst of a movement of the arts that 
exalts characteristics above the more typical 
qualities, it does not show us that beauti- 
ful and gracious nature. There is an exag- 
geration of the hollows of the cheeks and 
of the form of the bones which empties 
the face of the balance and delicacy of its 
lines. He was a very handsome man, as 
women who have imagination and tradi- 
tion understand those words, and had he 
not been so, mind and character had been 
different. There are certain men, certain 
famous commanders of antiquity, for in- 
stance, of whose good looks the historian 
always speaks, and whose good looks are 
the image of their faculty ; and these men 
copying hawk or leopard have an energy of 
swift decision, a power of sudden action, 
as if their whole body were their brain. 
208 



JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOE 209 

A few years ago he was returning from 
America, and the hner reached Queenstown 
in a storm so great that, the tender that 
came out to it for passengers returned with 
only one man. It was John Shawe-Taylor, 
who had leaped as it was swept away from 
the ship. 

The achievement that has made his 
name historic and changed the history of 
Ireland came from the same faculty of 
calculation and daring, from that instant 
decision of the hawk, between the move- 
ment of whose wings and the perception 
of whose eye no time passes capable of 
division. A proposal for a Land Con- 
ference had been made, and cleverer men 
than he were but talking the life out of it. 
Every argument for and against had been 
debated over and over, and it was plain 
that nothing but argument would come 
of it. One day we found a letter in the 
daily papers, signed with his name, saying 
that a conference would be held on a certain 
date, and that certain leaders of the land- 
lords and of the tenants were invited. 
He had made his swift calculation, prob- 



210 JOHN SHAWE-TATLOR 

ably he could not have told the reason for 
it, a decision had arisen out of his in- 
stinct. He was then almost an unknown 
man. Had the letter failed, he would 
have seemed a crack-brained fool to his 
life's end ; but the calculation of his 
genius was justified. He had, as men of 
his type have often, given an expression 
to the hidden popular desires; and the 
expression of the hidden is the daring of 
the mind. Wlien he had spoken, so many 
others spoke that the thing was taken out 
of the mouths of the leaders, it was as 
though some power deeper than our daily 
thought had spoken, and men recognised 
that common instinct, that common sense 
which is genius. Men like him live near 
this power because of something simple 
and impersonal within them which is, as 
I believe, imaged in the fire of their 
minds, as in the shape of their bodies and 
their faces. 

I do not think I have known another man 
whose motives were so entirely pure, so 
entirely unmixed with any personal calcu- 
lation, whether of ambition, of prudence 



JOHN SHAWE-TATLOR 211 

or of vanity. He caught up into his im- 
agination the pubUc gain as other men 
their private gain. For much of his hfe 
he had seemed, though a good soldier 
and a good shot, and a good rider to 
hounds, to care deeply for nothing but 
religion, and this religion, so curiously 
lacking in denominational limits, con- 
cerned itself alone with the communion 
of the soul with God. Such men, before 
some great decision, will sometimes give 
to the analysis of their own motive the 
energy that other men give to the ex- 
amination of the circumstances wherein 
they act, and it is often those who 
attain in this way to purity of motive 
who act most wisely at moments of great 
crisis. It is as though they sank a well 
through the soil where our habits have 
been built, and where our hopes take root 
and are again uprooted, to the lasting rock 
and to the living stream. They are those 
for whom Tennyson claimed the strength 
of ten, and the common and clever wonder 
at their simplicity and at a triumph that 
has always an air of miracle about it. 



f 

212 JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOB 

Some two years ago Ireland lost a great 
aesthetic genius, and it may be it should 
mourn, as it must mourn John Synge 
always, that which is gone from it in this 
man's moral genius. And yet it may be 
that, though he died in early manhood, his 
work was finished, that the sudden flash of 
his mind was of those things that come 
but seldom in a lifetime, and that his name 
is as much a part of history as though he 
had lived through many laborious years. 

July 1, 1911. 



EDMUND SPENSER 



We know little of Spenser's childhood 
and nothing of his parents, except that his 
father was probably an Edmund Spenser 
of north-east Lancashire, a man of good 
blood and 'belonging to a house of ancient 
fame.' He was born in London in 1552, 
nineteen years after the death of Ariosto, 
and when Tasso was about eight years old. 
Full of the spirit of the Renaissance, at 
once passionate and artificial, looking out 
upon the world now as craftsman, now as 
connoisseur, he was to found his art upon 
theirs rather than upon the more humane, 
the more noble, the less intellectual art of 
Malory and the Minstrels. Deafened and 
blinded by their influence, as so many of 
us were in boyhood by that art of Hugo, 
that made the old simple writers seem but 
as brown bread and water, he was always 
to love the journey more than its end, the 
213 



214 EDMUND SPENSER 

landscape more than the man, and reason 
more than Hfe, and the tale less than its 
telling. He entered Pembroke College, 
Cambridge, in 1569, and translated alle- 
gorical poems out of Petrarch and Du 
Bellay. To-day a young man translates 
out of Verlaine and Verhaeren ; but at that 
day Ronsard and Du Bellay were the liv- 
ing poets, who promised revolutionary 
and unheard-of things to a poetry movi^^g 
towards elaboration and intellect, as ours 

— the serpent's tooth in his own tail again 

— moves towards simplicity and instinct. 
At Cambridge he met with Hobbinol of 
The Shepheards Calender, a certain Gabriel 
Harvey, son of a rope-maker at Saffron 
Walden, but now a Fellow of Pembroke 
College, a notable man, some five or six 
years his elder. It is usual to think ill of 
Harvey because of his dislike of rhyme and 
his advocacy of classical metres, and be- 
cause he complained that Spenser pre- 
ferred his Faerie Queene to the Nine Muses, 
and encouraged Hobgoblin 'to run off 
with the Garland of Apollo.' But at that 
crossroad, where so many crowds mingled 



EDMUND SPENSER 215 

talking of so many lands, no one could 
foretell in what bed he would sleep after 
nightfall. Milton was in the end to dis- 
like rhyme as much, and it is certain that 
rhyme is one of the secondary causes of 
that disintegration of the personal instincts 
which has given to modern poetry its deep 
colour for colour's sake, its overflowing 
pattern, its background of decorative 
landscape, and its insubordination of de- 
tail. At the opening of a movement we are 
busy with first principles, and can find out 
everything but the road we are to go, 
everything but the weight and measure 
of the impulse, that has come to us out of 
life itself, for that is always in defiance of 
reason, always without a justification but 
by faith and works. Harvey set Spenser 
to the making of verses in classical metre, 
and certain lines have come down to us 
written in what Spenser called 'lambicum 
trimetrum.' His biographers agree that 
they are very bad, but, though I cannot 
scan them, I find in them the charm of 
what seems a sincere personal emotion. 
The man himself, liberated from the mi- 



216 EDMUND SPENSER 

nute felicities of phrase and sound, that 
are the temptation and the dehght of 
rhyme, speaks of his Mistress some thought 
that came to him not for the sake of poetry, 
but for love's sake, and the emotion instead 
of dissolving into detached colours, into 
' the spangly gloom ' that Keats saw ' froth 
and boil' when he put his eyes into 'the 
pillowy cleft,' speaks to her in poignant 
words as if out of a tear-stained love-letter : 

* Unhappie verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state, 
Make thy selfe fluttring winge for thy fast flying 
Thought, and fly forth to my love wheresoever she 

be. 
Whether lying restlesse in heavy bedde, or else 
Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerful boorde, or else 
Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie virginals. 
If in bed, tell hir that my eyes can take no rest; 
If at boorde tell her that my mouth can eat no 

meate 
If at her virginals, tell her that I can heare no 

mirth.' 

II 

He left College in his twenty-fourth 
year, and stayed for a while in Lancashire, 
where he had relations, and there fell in 



EDMUND SPENSER 217 

love with one he has written of in The 
Shepheards Calender as ' Rosahnd, the wid- 
dowes daughter of the Glenn,' though 
she was, for all her shepherding, as one 
learns from a College friend, 'a, gentle- 
woman of no mean house.' She married 
Menalchus of the Calender amd Spenser 
lamented her for years, in verses so full 
of disguise that one cannot say if his 
lamentations come out of a broken heart 
or are but a useful movement in the elab- 
orate ritual of his poetry, a well-ordered 
incident in the mythology of his imagina- 
tion. To no English poet, perhaps to no 
European poet before his day, had the nat- 
ural expression of personal feeling been so 
impossible, the clear vision of the linea- 
ments of human character so difficult ; no 
other's head and eyes had sunk so far 
into the pillowy cleft. After a year of 
this life he went to London, and by Har- 
vey's advice and introduction entered the 
service of the Earl of Leicester, staying 
for a while in his house on the banks of 
the Thames ; and it was there in all likeli- 
hood that he met with the Earl's nephew, 



218 EDMUND SPENSER 

Sir Philip Sidney, still little more than a 
boy, but with his head full of affairs of 
state. One can imagine that it was the 
great Earl or Sir Philip Sidney that gave 
his imagination its moral and practical 
turn, and one imagines him seeking from 
philosophical men, who distrust instinct 
because it disturbs contemplation, and 
from practical men who distrust every- 
thing they cannot use in the routine 
of immediate events, that impulse and 
method of creation that can only be learned 
with surety from the technical criticism of 
poets, and from the excitement of some 
movement in the artistic life. Marlowe 
and Shakespeare were still at school, and 
Ben Jonson was but five years old. Sidney 
was doubtless the greatest personal in- 
fluence that came into Spenser's life, and 
it was one that exalted moral zeal above 
every other faculty. The great Earl im- 
pressed his imagination very deeply also, 
for the lamentation over the Earl of Leices- 
ter's death is more than a conventional 
Ode to a dead patron. Spenser's verses 
about men, nearly always indeed, seem to 



EDMUND SPENSER 219 

express more of personal joy and sorrow 
than those about women, perhaps because 
he was less deliberately a poet when he 
spoke of men. At the end of a long beau- 
tiful passage he laments that unworthy 
men should be in the dead Earl's place, 
and compares them to the fox — an un- 
clean feeder — hiding in the lair ' the 
badger swept.' The imaginer of the fes- 
tivals of Kenilworth was indeed the fit 
patron for him, and alike, because of the 
strength and weakness of Spenser's art, 
one regrets that he could not have lived 
always in that elaborate life, a master of 
ceremony to the world, instead of being 
plunged into a life that but stirred him 
to bitterness, as the way is with theoret- 
ical minds in the tumults of events they 
cannot understand. In the winter of 
1579-80 he pubhshed The Shepheards Cal- 
ender^ a book of twelve eclogues, one for 
every month of the year, and dedicated it 
to Sir Philip Sidney. It was full of pas- 
toral beauty and allegorical images of 
current events, revealing too that conflict 
between the aesthetic and moral interests 



220 EDMUND SPENSER 

that was to run through well-nigh all his 
works, and it became immediately famous. 
He was rewarded with a place as private 
secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord 
Grey de Wilton, and sent to Ireland, 
where he spent nearly all the rest of his 
life. After a few years there he bought 
Kilcolman Castle, which had belonged to 
the rebel Earl of Desmond, and the rivers 
and hills about this castle came much into 
his poetry. Our Irish Aubeg is 'MuUa 
mine, whose waves I taught to weep,' and 
the Ballyvaughan Hills, it has its rise 
among 'old Father Mole.' He never 
pictured the true countenance of Irish 
scenery, for his mind turned constantly 
to the courts of Elizabeth and to the 
umbrageous level lands, where his own 
race was already seeding like a great 
poppy : 

* Both heaven and heavenly graces do much more 
(Quoth he), abound in that same land then this : 
For there all happie peace and plenteous store 
Conspire in one to make contented bhsse. 
No wayUng there nor wretchednesse is heard, 
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies, 



EDMUND SPENSER 221 

No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard, 
No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries; 
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie 
On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger, 
No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy, 
Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger, 
The learned arts do florish in great honor, 
And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price.' 

Nor did he ever understand the people 
he lived among or the historical events 
that were changing all things about him. 
Lord Grey de Wilton had been recalled 
almost immediately, but it was his 
policy, brought over ready-made in his 
ship, that Spenser advocated throughout 
all his life, equally in his long prose book 
The State of Ireland as in the Faerie Queene, 
where Lord Grey was Artigall and the 
Iron man the soldiers and executioners by 
whose hands he worked. Like an hys- 
terical patient he drew a complicated web 
of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an 
insufficient premise — there was no right, 
no law, but that of Elizabeth, and all 
that opposed her opposed themselves to 
God, to civiHsation, and to all inherited 



222 EDMUND SPENSER 

wisdom and courtesy, and should be put 
to death. He made two visits to England, 
celebrating one of them in Colin Clouts 
come Home againe, to publish the first 
three books and the second three books 
of the Faerie Queene respectively, and to 
try for some English office or pension. 
By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour 
at Kilcolman, he had been promised a 
pension, but was kept out of it by Lord 
Burleigh, who said, 'All that for a song !' 
From that day Lord Burleigh became that 
'rugged forehead' of the poems, whose 
censure of this or that is complained of. 
During the last three or four years of his 
life in Ireland he married a fair woman of 
his neighbourhood, and about her wrote 
many intolerable artificial sonnets and 
that most beautiful passage in the sixth 
book of the Faerie Queene, which tells of 
Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to 
her; and he celebrated his marriage in 
the most beautiful of all his poems, the 
Epithalamium. His genius was pictorial, 
and these pictures of happiness were more 
natural to it than any personal pride, 



EDMUND SPENSER 223 

or joy, or sorrow. His new happiness 
was very brief, and just as he was rising 
to something of Milton's grandeur in the 
fragment that has been called Mutahilitie, 
'the wandering companies that keep the 
woods,' as he called the Irish armies, 
drove him to his death. Ireland, where 
he saw nothing but work for the Iron man, 
was in the midst of the last struggle of 
the old Celtic order with England, itself 
about to turn bottom upward, of the pas- 
sion of the Middle Ages with the craft 
of the Renaissance. Seven years after 
Spenser's arrival in Ireland a large mer- 
chant ship had carried off from Loch 
Swilly, by a very crafty device common in 
those days, certain persons of importance. 
Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming 
head of Tirconnell, and various heads of 
clans had been enticed on board the mer- 
chant ship to drink of a fine vintage, and 
there made prisoners. All but Red Hugh 
were released, on finding substitutes among 
the boys of their kindred, and the captives 
were hurried to Dubhn and imprisoned in 
the Birmingham Tower. After four years 



224 EDMUND SPENSER 

of captivity and one attempt that failed, Red 
Hugh and certain of his companions escaped 
into the Dubhn mountains, one dying there 
of cold and privation, and from that to 
their own country-side. Red Hugh allied 
himself to Hugh O'Neil, the most powerful 
of the Irish leaders — ' Oh, deep, dis- 
sembling heart, born to great weal or woe 
of thy country ! ' an English historian had 
cried to him — an Oxford man too, a man 
of the Renaissance, and for a few years 
defeated English armies and shook the 
power of England. The Irish, stirred by 
these events, and with it maybe some 
rumours of The State of Ireland stick- 
ing in their stomachs, drove Spenser 
out of doors and burnt his house, one of 
his children, as tradition has it, dying 
in the fire. He fled to England, and died 
some three months later in January, 1599, 
as Ben Jonson says, 'of lack of bread.' 

During the last four or five years of his 
life he had seen, without knowing that he 
saw it, the beginning of the great Eliza- 
bethan poetical movement. In 1598 he 
had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting 



EDMUND SPENSER 225 

each one over the evil state in England, of 
the things that she had in charge, but, Hke 
WiUiam Blake's more beautiful Whether on 
Ida's shady brow, their lamentations should 
have been a cradle-song. When he died 
Romeo and Juliet, Richard III., and Rich- 
ard II., and the plays of Marlowe had all 
been acted, and in stately houses were 
sung madrigals and love songs whose like 
has not been in the world since. Italian 
influence had strengthened the old French 
joy that had never died out among the 
upper classes, and an art was being created 
for the last time in England which had 
half its beauty from continually suggesting 
a life hardly less beautiful than itself. 

Ill 

When Spenser was buried at West- 
minster Abbey many poets read verses in 
his praise, and then threw their verses and 
the pens that had written them into his 
tomb. Like him they belonged, for all 
the moral zeal that was gathering like a 
London fog, to that indolent, demonstra- 



226 EDMUND SPENSER 

tive Merry England that was about to 
pass away. Men still wept when they 
were moved, still dressed themselves in 
joyous colours, and spoke with many 
gestures. Thoughts and qualities some- 
times come to their perfect expression 
when they are about to pass away, and 
Merry England was dying in plays, and in 
poems, and in strange adventurous men. 
If one of those poets who threw his copy 
of verses into the earth that was about to 
close over his master were to come alive 
again, he would find some shadow of the 
life he knew, though not the art he knew, 
among young men in Paris, and would 
think that his true country. If he came 
to England he would find nothing there 
but the triumph of the Puritan and the 
merchant — those enemies he had feared 
and hated — and he would weep perhaps, 
in that womanish way of his, to think that 
so much greatness had been, not as he had 
hoped, the dawn, but the sunset of a people. 
He had lived in the last days of what we 
may call the Anglo-French nation, the old 
feudal nation that had been estabhshed 



EDMUND SPENSER 227 

when the Norman and the Angevin made 
French the language of court and market. 
In the time of Chaucer Enghsh poets still 
wrote much in French, and even English 
labourers hlted French songs over their 
work ; and I cannot read any Elizabethan 
poem or romance without feeling the 
pressure of habits of emotion, and of an 
order of life which were conscious, for all 
their Latin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death 
with that new Anglo-Saxon nation that 
was arising amid Puritan sermons and 
Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This nation had 
driven out the language of its conquerors, 
and now it was to overthrow their beau- 
tiful haughty imagination and their man- 
ners, full of abandon and wilfulness, 
and to set in their stead earnestness and 
logic and the timidity and reserve of a 
counting-house. It had been coming for 
a long while, for it had made the Lollards ; 
and when Anglo-French Chaucer was at 
Westminster its poet, Langland, sang the 
office at St. Paul's. Shakespeare, with his 
delight in great persons, with his indiffer- 
ence to the State, with his scorn of the 



228 EDMUND SPENSER 

crowd, with his feudal passion, was of the 
old nation, and Spenser, though a joyless 
earnestness had cast shadows upon him, 
and darkened his intellect wholly at times, 
was of the old nation too. His Faerie 
Queene was written in Merry England, 
but when Bunyan wrote in prison the other 
great Enghsh allegory, Modern England 
had been born. Bunyan's men would do 
right that they might come some day to 
the Delectable Mountain, and not at all 
that they might live happily in a world 
whose beauty was but an entanglement 
about their feet. Religion had denied 
the sacredness of an earth that commerce 
was about to corrupt and ravish, but when 
Spenser lived the earth had still its shel- 
tering sacredness. His religion, where 
the paganism that is natural to proud and 
happy people had been strengthened by 
the platonism of the Renaissance, cher- 
ished the beauty of the soul and the beauty 
of the body with, as it seemed, an equal 
affection. He would have had men live 
well, not merely that they might win 
eternal happiness but that they might live 



EDMUND SPENSER 229 

splendidly among men and be celebrated 
in many songs. How could one live well 
if one had not the joy of the Creator and 
of the Giver of gifts? He says in his 
Hymn to Beauty that a beautiful soul, 
unless for some stubbornness in the ground, 
makes for itself a beautiful body, and he 
even denies that beautiful persons ever 
lived who had not souls as beautiful. 
They may have been tempted until they 
seemed evil, but that was the fault of 
others. And in his Hymn to Heavenly 
Beauty he sets a woman little known to 
theology, one that he names Wisdom or 
Beauty, above Seraphim and Cherubim 
and in the very bosom of God, and in the 
Faerie Queene it is pagan Venus and her 
lover Adonis who create the forms of all 
living things and send them out into the 
world, calling them back again to the gar- 
dens of Adonis at their lives' end to rest 
there, as it seems, two thousand years 
between life and life. He began in Eng- 
lish poetry, despite a temperament that 
delighted in sensuous beauty alone with 
perfect delight, that worship of Intellectual 



230 EDMUND SPENSER 

Beauty which Shelley carried to a greater 
subtlety and applied to the whole of life. 

The qualities, to each of whom he had 
planned to give a Knight, he had borrowed 
from Aristotle and partly Christianised, 
but not to the forgetting of their heathen 
birth. The chief of the Knights, who 
would have combined in himself the qual- 
ities of all the others, had Spenser lived to 
finish the Faerie Queene, was King Arthur, 
the representative of an ancient quality, 
Magnificence. Born at the moment of 
change, Spenser had indeed many Puritan 
thoughts. It has been recorded that he 
cut his hair short and half regretted his 
hymns to Love and Beauty. But he has 
himself told us that the many-headed 
beast overthrown and bound by Calidor, 
Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism itself. 
Puritanism, its zeal and its narrowness, and 
the angry suspicion that it had in common 
with all movements of the ill-educated, 
seemed no other to him than a slanderer 
of all fine things. One doubts, indeed, if 
he could have persuaded himself that there 
could be any virtue at all without courtesy, 



EDMUND SPENSER 231 

perhaps without something of pageant and 
eloquence. He was, I think, by nature 
altogether a man of that old Catholic 
feudal nation, but, like Sidney, he wanted 
to justify himself to his new masters. He 
wrote of knights and ladies, wild creatures 
imagined by the aristocratic poets of the 
twelfth century, and perhaps chiefly by 
English poets who had still the French 
tongue; but he fastened them with alle- 
gorical nails to a big barn door of common 
sense, of merely practical virtue. Alle- 
gory itself had risen into general impor- 
tance with the rise of the merchant class 
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ; 
and it was natural when that class was 
about for the first time to shape an age in 
its image, that the last epic poet of the old 
order should mix its art with his own 
long-descended, irresponsible, happy art. 

IV 

Allegory and, to a much greater degree, 
symbolism are a natural language by which 
the soul when entranced, or even in ordi- 



232 EDMUND SPENSER 

nary sleep, conununes with God and with 
angels. They can speak of things which 
cannot be spoken of in any other language, 
but one will always, I think, feel some 
sense of unreality when they are used to 
describe things which can be described as 
well in ordinary words. Dante used alle- 
gory to describe visionary things, and the 
first maker of The Romance of the Rose, for 
all his lighter spirits, pretends that his 
adventures came to him in a vision one 
May morning; while Bunyan, by his pre- 
occupation with heaven and the soul, gives 
his simple story a visionary strangeness and 
intensity : he believes so little in the world, 
that he takes us away from all ordinary 
standards of probability and makes us 
believe even in allegory for a while. 
Spenser, on the other hand, to whom alle- 
gory was not, as I think, natural at all, 
makes us feel again and again that it dis- 
appoints and interrupts our preoccupation 
with the beautiful and sensuous life he has 
called up before our eyes. It interrupts us 
most when he copies Langland, and writes 
in what he believes to be a mood of edifica- 



EDMUND SPENSER 233 

tion, and the least when he is not quite 
serious, when he sets before us some proces- 
sion Uke a court pageant made to celebrate 
a wedding or a crowning. One cannot 
think that he should have occupied him- 
self with moral and religious questions at 
all. He should have been content to be, 
as Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a 
Master of the Revels to mankind. I am 
certain that he never gets that visionary- 
air which can alone make allegory real, 
except when he writes out of a feeling for 
glory and passion. He had no deep moral 
or religious life. He has never a line like 
Dante's 'Thy Will is our Peace,' or like 
Thomas a Kempis's 'The Holy Spirit has 
liberated me from a multitude of opinions,' 
or even like Hamlet's objection to the bare 
bodkin. He had been made a poet by 
what he had almost learnt to call his sins. 
If he had not felt it necessary to justify his 
art to some serious friend, or perhaps even 
to 'that rugged forehead,' he would have 
written all his life long, one thinks, of the 
loves of shepherdesses and shepherds, 
among whom there would have been per- 



234 EDMUND SPENSER 

haps the morals of the dovecot. One is 
persuaded that his morahty is official and 
impersonal — a system of life which it was 
his duty to support — and it is perhaps 
a half understanding of this that has made 
so many generations believe that he was 
the first poet laureate, the first salaried 
moralist among the poets. His proces- 
sions of deadly sins, and his houses, where 
the very cornices are arbitrary images of 
virtue, are an unconscious hypocrisy, an 
undelighted obedience to the 'rugged fore- 
head,' for all the while he is thinking of 
nothing but lovers whose bodies are quiver- 
ing with the memory or the hope of long 
embraces. When they are not together, 
he will indeed embroider emblems and 
images much as those great ladies of the 
courts of love embroidered them in their 
castles; and when these are imagined out 
of a thirst for magnificence and not thought 
out in a mood of edification, they are 
beautiful enough; but they are always 
tapestries for corridors that lead to lovers' 
meetings or for the walls of marriage 
chambers. He was not passionate, for the 



EDMUND SPENSER 235 

passionate feed their flame in wanderings 
and absences, when the whole being of the 
beloved, every httle charm of body and of 
soul, is always present to the mind, filling 
it with heroical subtleties of desire. He is 
a poet of the delighted senses, and his song 
becomes most beautiful when he writes of 
those islands of Phadria and Acrasia, 
which angered 'that rugged forehead,' as 
it seems, but gave to Keats his Belle Dame 
sans Merci and his 'perilous seas in faery 
lands forlorn,' and to William Morris his 
'waters of the wondrous Isle.' 



The dramatists lived in a disorderly 
world, reproached by many, persecuted 
even, but following their imagination 
wherever it led them. Their imagination, 
driven hither and thither by beauty and 
sympathy, put on something of the nature 
of eternity. Their subject was always 
the soul, the whimsical, self-awakening, 
self-exciting, self -appeasing soul. They 
celebrated its heroical, passionate will 



236 EDMUND SPENSER 

going by its own path to immortal and in- 
visible things. Spenser, on the other hand, 
except among those smooth pastoral scenes 
and lovely effeminate islands that have 
made him a great poet, tried to be of his 
time, or rather of the time that was all but 
at hand. Like Sidney, whose charm it 
may be led many into slavery, he per- 
suaded himself that we enjoy Virgil be- 
cause of the virtues of MnesiS, and so 
planned out his immense poem that it 
would set before the imagination of citi- 
zens, in whom there would soon be 
no great energy, innumerable blameless 
iEneases. He had learned to put the State, 
which desires all the abundance for itself, 
in the place of the Church, and he found 
it possible to be moved by expedient emo- 
tions, merely because they were expedient, 
and to think serviceable thoughts with no 
self-contempt. He loved his Queen a little 
because she was the protectress of poets 
and an image of that old Anglo-French 
nation that lay a-dying, but a great deal 
because she was the image of the State 
which had taken possession of his con- 



EDMUND SPENSER 237 

science. She was over sixty years old, 
and ugly and, it is thought, selfish, but 
in his poetry she is ^fair Cynthia,' 'a crown 
of lilies,' Hhe image of the heavens,' 'with- 
out mortal blemish,' and has 'an angelic 
face,' where Hhe red rose' has 'meddled 
with the white ' ; ' Phoebus thrusts out his 
golden head' but to look upon her, and 
blushes to find himself outshone. She is 
' a fourth Grace,' ' a queen of love,' ' a sacred 
saint,' and 'above all her sex that ever yet 
has been.' In the midst of his praise of 
his own sweetheart he stops to remember 
that Elizabeth is more beautiful, and an 
old man in Daphnaida, although he has 
been brought to death's door by the death 
of a beautiful daughter, remembers that 
though his daughter 'seemed of angelic 
race,' she was yet but the primrose to 
the rose beside Elizabeth. Spenser had 
learned to look to the State not only as the 
rewarder of virtue but as the maker of 
right and wrong, and had begun to love 
and hate as it bid him. The thoughts 
that we find for ourselves are timid and a 
little secret, but those modern thoughts 



238 EDMUND SPENSER 

that we share with large numbers are con- 
fident and very insolent. We have little 
else to-day, and when we read our news- 
paper and take up its cry, above all its 
cry of hatred, we will not think very care- 
fully, for we hear the marching feet. 
When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote 
as an official, and out of thoughts and emo- 
tions that had been organised by the State. 
He was the first of many Englishmen to see 
nothing but what he was desired to see. 
Could he have gone there as a poet merely, 
he might have found among its poets more 
wonderful imaginations than even those 
islands of Phsedria and Acrasia. He would 
have found among wandering story-tellers, 
not indeed his own power of rich, sustained 
description, for that belongs to lettered 
ease, but certainly all the kingdom of 
Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own 
poetry was often but a troubled image. 
He would have found men doing by swift 
strokes of the imagination much that he 
was doing with painful intellect, with that 
imaginative reason that soon was to drive 
out imagination altogether and for a long 



EDMUND SPENSER 239 

time. He would have met with, at his 
own door, story-tellers among whom the 
perfection of Greek art was indeed as un- 
known as his own power of detailed descrip- 
tion, but who, none the less, imagined 
or remembered beautiful incidents and 
strange, pathetic outcrying that made 
them of Homer's Hneage. Flaubert says 
somewhere, 'There are things in Hugo, 
as in Rabelais, that I could have mended, 
things badly built, but then what thrusts 
of power beyond the reach of conscious 
art ! ' Is not all history but the coming of 
that conscious art which first makes artic- 
ulate and then destroys the old wild energy? 
Spenser, the first poet struck with remorse, 
the first poet who gave his heart to the 
State, saw nothing but disorder, where the 
mouths that have spoken all the fables of 
the poets had not yet become silent. All 
about him were shepherds and shepherd- 
esses still living the life that made Theoc- 
ritus and Virgil think of shepherd and poet 
as the one thing; but though he dreamed 
of Virgil's shepherds he wrote a book to ad- 
vise, among many like things, the harrying 



240 EDMUND SPENSER 

of all that followed flocks upon the hills, 
and of all Hhe wandering companies that 
keep the woods.' His View of the State 
of Ireland commends indeed the beauty of 
the hills and woods where they did their 
shepherding, in that powerful and subtle 
language of his which I sometimes think 
more full of youthful energy than even the 
language of the great playwrights. He is 
'sure it is yet a most beautiful and sweet 
country as any under heaven,' and that 
all would prosper but for those agitators, 
'those wandering companies that keep the 
woods,' and he would rid it of them by 
a certain expeditious way. There should 
be four great garrisons. 'And those fowre 
garrisons issuing foorthe, at such conven- 
ient times as they shall have intelligence 
or espiall upon the enemye, will so drive 
him from one side to another and tennis 
him amongst them, that he shall finde no- 
where safe to keepe his creete, or hide him- 
selfe, but flying from the fire shall fall into 
the water, and out of one daunger into 
another, that in short space his creete, 
which is his moste sustenence, shall be 



EDMUND SPENSER 241 

wasted in preying, or killed in driving, or 
starved for wante of pasture in the woodes, 
and he himselfe brought soe lowe, that he 
shall have no harte nor abilitye to indure 
his wretchednesse, the which will surely 
come to passe in very short space ; for one 
winters well following of him will so plucke 
him on his knees that he will never be able 
to stand up agayne.' 

He could commend this expeditious 
way from personal knowledge, and could 
assure the Queen that the people of the 
country would soon 'consume themselves 
and devoure one another. The proofs 
whereof I saw sufficiently ensampled in 
these late warres of Mounster; for not- 
withstanding that the same was a most 
rich and plentifull countrey, full of corne 
and cattell, that you would have thought 
they would have bene able to stand long, 
yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were 
brought to such wretchednesse, as that 
any stonye heart would have rued the 
same. Out of every corner of the woodes 
and glynnes they came creeping forth upon 
theyr hands, for theyr legges could not 



242 EDMUND SPENSER 

beare them; they looked Hke anatomyes 
of death, they spake hke ghosts crying 
out of their graves; they did eate of the 
dead carrions, happy were they if they 
could finde them, yea, and one another 
soone after, insomuch as the very carcasses 
they spared not to scrape out of theyr 
graves ; and if they found a plot of water- 
cresses or shamrokes, there they flocked 
as to a feast for the time, yet not able long 
to continue therewithall ; that in short 
space there were none allmost left, and a 
most populous and plentifull countrey 
suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; 
yet sure in all that warre, there perished 
not many by the sword, but all by the 
extremitye of famine.' 

VI 

In a few years the Four Masters were 
to write the history of that time, and they 
were to record the goodness or the bad- 
ness of Irishman and Englishman with 
entire impartiality. They had seen friends 
and relatives persecuted, but they would 



EDMUND SPENSER 243 

write of that man's poisoning and this 
man's charities and of the fall of great 
houses, and hardly with any other emo- 
tion than a thought of the pitiableness of 
all life. Friend and enemy would be for 
them a part of the spectacle of the world. 
They remembered indeed those Anglo- 
French invaders who conquered for the 
sake of their own strong hand, and when 
they had conquered became a part of the 
life about them, singing its songs, when 
they grew weary of their own Iseult and 
Guinevere. The Four Masters had not 
come to understand, as I think, despite 
famines and exterminations, that new in- 
vaders were among them, who fought for 
an alien State, for an alien religion. Such 
ideas were difficult to them, for they be- 
longed to the old individual, poetical life, 
and spoke a language even, in which it was 
all but impossible to think an abstract 
thought. They understood Spain, doubt- 
less, which persecuted in the interests of 
religion, but I doubt if anybody in Ireland 
could have understood as yet that the 
Anglo-Saxon nation was beginning to 



244 EDMUND SPENSER 

persecute in the service of ideas it believed 
to be the foundation of the State. I doubt 
if anybody in Ireland saw that with cer- 
tainty, till the Great Demagogue had 
come and turned the old house of the noble 
into 'the house of the Poor, the lonely 
house, the accursed house of Cromwell/ 
He came, another Cairbry Cat Head, with 
that great rabble, who had overthrown 
the pageantry of Church and Court, but 
who turned towards him faces full of the 
sadness and docility of their long servitude, 
and the old individual, poetical life went 
down, as it seems, for ever. He had stud- 
ied Spenser's book and approved of it, as 
we know, finding, doubtless, his own head 
there, for Spenser, a king of the old race, 
carried a mirror which showed kings yet 
to come though but kings of the mob. 
Those Bohemian poets of the theatres were 
wiser, for the States that touched them 
nearly were the States where Helen and 
Dido had sorrowed, and so their mirrors 
showed none but beautiful heroical heads. 
They wandered in the places that pale 
passion loves, and were happy, as one 



EDMUND SPENSER 245 

thinks, and troubled little about those 
marching and hoarse-throated thoughts 
that the State has in its pay. They knew 
that those marchers, with the dust of so 
many roads upon them, are very robust and 
have great and well-paid generals to write 
expedient despatches in sound prose; and 
they could hear mother earth singing 
among her cornfields : 

'Weep not, my wanton ! smile upon my knee; 
When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.' 

VII 

There are moments when' one can read 
neither Milton nor Spenser, moments when 
one recollects nothing but that their flesh 
had partly been changed to stone, but 
there are other moments when one recol- 
lects nothing but those habits of emotion 
that made the lesser poet especially a man 
of an older, more imaginative time. One 
remembers that he delighted in smooth 
pastoral places, because men could be busy 
there or gather together there, after their 
work, that he could love handiwork and 



246 EDMUND SPENSER 

the hum of voices. One remembers that 
he could still rejoice in the trees, not be- 
cause they were images of loneliness and 
meditation, but because of their service- 
ableness. He could praise 'the builder 
oake,' 'the aspine, good for staves,' 'the cy- 
presse funerall,' 'the eugh, obedient to the 
bender's will,' 'the birch for shaftes,' 'the 
sallow for the mill,' 'the mirrhe sweete- 
bleeding in the bitter wound,' ' the fruitful 
olive,' and 'the carver holme.' He was 
of a time before undelighted labour had 
made the business of men a desecration. 
He carries one's memory back to Virgil's 
and Chaucer's praise of trees, and to the 
sweet-sounding song made by the old Irish 
poet in their praise. 

I got up from reading the Faerie Queene 
the other day and wandered into another 
room. It was in a friend's house, and I 
came of a sudden to the ancient poetry and 
to our poetry side by side — an engraving 
of Claude's ' Mill ' hung under an engraving 
of Turner's 'Temple of Jupiter.' Those 
dancing country-people, those cow-herds, 
resting after the day's work, and that quiet 
mill-race made one think of Merry Eng- 



EDMUND SPENSER 247 

land with its glad Latin heart, of a time 
when men in every land found poetry and 
imagination in one another's company and 
in the day's labour. Those stately god- 
desses, moving in slow procession towards 
that marble architrave among mysterious 
trees, belong to Shelley's thought, and to 
the religion of the wilderness — the only 
religion possible to poetry to-day. Cer- 
tainly Colin Clout, the companionable 
shepherd, and Calidor, the courtly man- 
at-arms, are gone, and Alastor is wandering 
from lonely river to river finding happiness 
in nothing but in that star where Spenser 
too had imagined the fountain of perfect 
things. This new beauty, in losing so 
much, has indeed found a new loftiness, a 
something of religious exaltation that the 
old had not. It may be that those god- 
desses, moving with a majesty like a pro- 
cession of the stars, mean something to the 
soul of man that those kindly women of the 
old poets did not mean, for all the fulness of 
their breasts and the joyous gravity of their 
eyes. Has not the wilderness been at all 
times a place of prophecy ? 



248 EDMUND SPENSER 

VIII 

Our poetry, though it has been a dehber- 
ate bringing back of the Latin joy and the 
Latin love of beauty, has had to put off 
the old marching rhythms, that once de- 
lighted more than expedient hearts, in 
separating itself from a life where servile 
hands have become powerful. It has 
ceased to have any burden for marching 
shoulders, since it learned ecstasy from 
Smart in his mad cell, and from Blake, who 
made joyous Httle songs out of almost unin- 
telligible visions, and from Keats, who sang 
of a beauty so wholly preoccupied with itself 
that its contemplation is a kind of lingering 
trance. The poet, if he would not carry 
burdens that are not his and obey the orders 
of servile lips, must sit^apart in contempla- 
tive indolence playing with fragile things. 

If one chooses at hazard a Spenserian 
stanza out of Shelley and compares it with 
any stanza by Spenser, one sees the change, 
though it would be still more clear if one 
had chosen a lyrical passage. I will take 
a stanza out of Laon and Cyihna, for that 



EDMUND SPENSER 249 

is story-telling and runs nearer to Spenser 
than the meditative Adonais: 

' The meteor to its far morass returned : 
The beating of our veins one interval 
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned 
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall 
Around my heart like fire; and over all 
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep' 
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall 
Two disunited spirits when they leap 
In union from this earth's obscure and fading sleep. 

The rhythm is varied and troubled, and 
the lines, which are in Spenser like bars of 
gold thrown ringing one upon another, are 
broken capriciously. Nor is the meaning 
the less an inspiration of indolent muses, for 
it wanders hither and thither at the beckon- 
ing of fancy. It is now busy with a meteor 
and now with throbbing blood that is fire, 
and with a mist that is a swoon and a 
sleep that is life. It is bound together by 
the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser's 
verse is always rushing on to some pre- 
ordained thought. 'A popular poet' can 
still indeed write poetry of the will, just as 
factory girls wear the fashion of hat or dress 



250 EDMUND SPENSER 

the moneyed classes wore a year ago, but 
'popular poetry' does not belong to the 
living imagination of the world. Old 
writers gave men four temperaments, and 
they gave the sanguineous temperament 
to men of active life, and it is precisely the 
sanguineous temperament that is fading 
out of poetry and most obviously out of 
what is most subtle and living in poetry — 
its pulse and breath, its rhythm. Because 
poetry belongs to that element in every 
race which is most strong, and therefore 
most individual, the poet is not stirred to 
imaginative activity by a life which is sur- 
rendering its freedom to ever new elabora- 
tion, organisation, mechanism. He has no 
longer a poetical will, and must be content 
to write out of those parts of himself which 
are too delicate and fiery for any deadening 
exercise. Every generation has more and 
more loosened the rhythm, more and more 
broken up and disorganised, for the sake 
of subtlety of detail, those great rhythms 
which move, as it were, in masses of 
sound. Poetry has become more spiritual, 
for the soul is of all things the most 



EDMUND SPENSER 251 

delicately organised, but it has lost in 
weight and measure and in its power of 
teUing long stories and of dealing with 
great and compUcated events. Laon and 
Cythna, though I think it rises sometimes 
into loftier air than the Faerie Queene; 
and Endymion, though its shepherds and 
wandering divinities have a stranger and 
more intense beauty than Spenser's, have 
need of too watchful and minute atten- 
tion for such lengthy poems. In William 
Morris, indeed, one finds a music smooth 
and unexacting like that of the old story- 
tellers, but not their energetic pleasure, 
their rhythmical wills. One too often 
misses in his Earthly Paradise the minute 
ecstasy of modern song without jfinding 
that old happy-go-lucky tune that had 
kept the story marching. 

Spenser's contemporaries, writing lyrics 
or plays full of lyrical moments, write a 
verse more delicately organised than his 
and crowd more meaning into a phrase than 
he, but they could not have kept one's 
attention through so long a poem. A 
friend who has a fine ear told me the other 



252 EDMUND SPENSER 

day that she had read all Spenser with 
delight and yet could remember only four 
lines. When she repeated them they were 
from the poem by Matthew Roydon, which 
is bound up with Spenser because it is a 
commendation of Sir Philip Sidney : 

'A sweet, attractive kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face, 
The lineaments of Gospel books.' 

Yet if one were to put even these lines be- 
side a fine modern song one would notice 
that they had a stronger and rougher energy, 
a featherweight more, if eye and ear were 
fine enough to notice it, of the active will, of 
the happiness that comes out of life itself. 

IX 

I have put into this book^ only those 
passages from Spenser that I want to 
remember and carry about with me. I 
have not tried to select what people call 
characteristic passages, for that is, I think, 

^ Poems of Spenser: Selected and with an Introduc- 
tion by W. B. Yeats. (T. C. and E. C. Jack, Edin- 
burgh, N.D.) 



EDMUND SPENSEB 253 

the way to make a dull book. One never 
really knows anybody's taste but one's 
own, and if one likes anything sincerely one 
may be certain that there are other people 
made out of the same earth to like it too. 
I have taken out of The Shepheards Calender 
only those parts which are about love or 
about old age, and I have taken out of the 
Faerie Queene passages about shepherds 
and lovers, and fauns and satyrs, and a few 
allegorical processions. I find that though 
I love symbolism, which is often the only 
fitting speech for some mystery of disem- 
bodied life, I am for the most part bored 
by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, 
' by the daughters of memory,' and coldly, 
with no wizard frenzy. The processions 
I have chosen are either those, like the 
House of Mammon, that have enough an- 
cient mythology, always an implicit sym- 
bolism, or, Uke the Cave of Despair, 
enough sheer passion to make one forget 
or forgive their allegory, or else they are, 
like that vision of Scudamour, so visionary, 
so full of a sort of ghostly midnight 
animation, that one is persuaded that they 



25 J: EDMUND SPENSER 

had some strange purpose and did truly 
appear in just that way to some mind worn 
out with war and trouble. The vision 
of Scudamour is, I sometimes think, the 
finest invention in Spenser, Until quite 
lately I knew nothing of Spenser but the 
parts I had read as a boy. I did not know 
that I had read so far as that vision, but 
year after year this thought would rise 
up . before me coming from I knew not 
where. I would be alone perhaps in some 
old building, and I would think suddenly 
' out of that door might come a procession of 
strange people doing mysterious things with 
tumult. They would walk over the stone 
floor, then suddenly vanish, and everything 
would become silent again.' Once I saw 
what is called, I think, a Board School con- 
tinuation class play Hamlet. There was no 
stage, but they walked in procession into 
the midst of a large room full of visitors and 
of their friends. While they were walking 
in, that thought came to me again from I 
knew not where. I was alone in a great 
church watching ghostly kings and queens 
setting out upon their unearthly business. 



EDMUND SPENSEB 255 

It was only last summer, when I read 
the Fourth Book of the Faerie Queene, that 
I found I had been imagining over and over 
the enchanted persecution of Amoret. 

I give too, in a section which I call 
'Gardens of Dehght,' the good gardens of 
Adonis and the bad gardens of Phaedria and 
Acrasia, which are mythological and sym- 
bolical, but not allegorical, and show, more 
particularly those bad islands, his power of 
describing bodily happiness and bodily 
beauty at its greatest. He seemed always 
to feel through the eyes, imagining every- 
thing in pictures. Marlowe's Hero and 
Leander is more energetic in its sensuality, 
more complicated in its intellectual energy 
than this languid story, which pictures 
always a happiness that would perish if the 
desire to which it offers so many roses lost 
its indolence and its softness. There is 
no passion in the pleasure he has set amid 
perilous seas, for he would have us under- 
stand that there alone could the war-worn 
and the sea-worn man find dateless leisure 
and unrepining peace. 

October, 1902. 



n^HE following pages contain advertisements 
of Macmillan books by the same author, 
and other poetic works. 



New Poems and Essays 

By WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 

" Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the 
most widely known of the men concerned directly in the 
so-called Celtic renaissance. More than this, he stands 
among the few men to be reckoned with in modern 
poetry." — New York Herald. 

The Green Helmet and Other Poems 

Decorated cloth, i2mo, $/.2j 
The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived 
heroic farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. 
It tells of the difficulty in which two simple Irish folk 
find themselves when they enter into an agreement with 
an apparition of the sea, who demands that they knock 
off his head and who maintains that after they have 
done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real 
meaning in the play which it will not take the thought- 
ful reader long to discover. Besides this there are a num- 
ber of shorter poems, notably one in which Mr. Yeats 
answers his critics of "The Playboy of the Western 
World." 

Plays New edition. Cloth. i2mo. $2.00 net 

This edition of Mr. Yeats's plays has been thoroughly 
revised and contains considerable new matter in the way 
of appendices. "The Countess Cathleen" and "The 
Land of Heart's Desire " are presented in new form, 
the versions being those which the Irish Players use. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



other Works by William Butler Yeats 

Lyrical and Dramatic Poems 

IN TWO VOLUMES 
Vol. I. Lyrical $1.75 net 

Vol. II. Plays (Revised) $2.00 net 

The two-volume edition of the Irish poet's works includes 
everything he has done in verse up to the present time. 
The first volume contains his lyrics ; the second includes 
all of his five dramas in verse: "The Countess Cathleen," 
"The Land of Heart's Desire," "The King's Threshold," 
"On Baile's Strand," and "The Shadowy Waters." 

William Butler Yeats stands among the few men to be 
reckoned with in modern poetry, especially of a dramatic 
character. The New York Sun, for example, refers to him 
as " an important factor in English literature," and con- 
tinues : — 

" ' Cathleen ni Hoolihan ' is a perfect piece of artistic work, 
poetic and wonderfully dramatic to read, and, we should 
imagine, far more dramatic in the acting. Maeterlinck has 
never done anything so true or effective as this short prose 
drama of Mr. Yeats's. There is not a superfluous word in 
the play and no word that does not tell. It must be dan- 
gerous to represent it in Ireland, for it is an Irish Marseil- 
laise. ... In 'The Hour Glass 'a noble and poetic idea 
is carried out effectively, while ' A Pot of Broth ' is merely a 
dramatized humorous anecdote. But ' Cathleen ni Hooli- 
han' stirs the blood, and in itself establishes Mr. Yeats's 
reputation for good." 

Other Works 

The Celtic Twilight ismo, $1.50 net 

The Hour Glass and Other Plays i2mo, $1.25 net 

Ideas of Good and Evil i2mo, $1.50 net 

In the Seven Woods i2mo, $1.00 net 

W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory 

Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays i2mo, $1.50 net 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Fi 



ires 

By W. W. GIBSON 

Author of " Daily Bread," " Womenkind," etc. 

Cloth, i2.mo, $1.25 net 

In this striking book of verse Mr. Gibson writes of simple, 
homely folk with touching sympathy. The author's previous 
book, " Daily Bread," was heralded far and wide as the 
book of the year in the field of poetry ; in " Fires " are con- 
tained many of the same characteristics which distinguished 
it. The story of a girl whose lover is struck dead by a flying 
bit of stone ; of a wife who has unusual patience with her 
husband's shortcomings ; of a flute player; of a shop and 
a shopkeeper; of a machine and those who feed it — these 
are the subjects of a number of the separate pieces. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
Daily Bread in Three Books ismo, $1.25 net 

Womenkind i2mo, $1.25 net 

" There is a man in England who with sufficient plainness 
and sufficient profoundness is addressing himself to life, 
and daring to chant his own times and social circumstances, 
who ought to become known to America. He is bringing 
a message which might well rouse his day and generation to 
an understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited 
— the overworked masses." 

" A Millet in word-painting, who writes with a terrible 
simplicity, is Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, born in Hexham, 
England, in 1878, of whom Canon Cheyne wrote : ' A new 
poet of the people has risen up among us — the story of a 
soul is written as plainly in " Daily Bread " as in " The 
Divine Comedy " and in " Paradise Lost. 

" Mr. Gibson is a genuine singer of his own day, and turns 
into appealing harmony the world's harshly jarring notes of 
poverty and pain." 

— Abridged from an article in "The Outlook," 



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A BOOK THAT HAS BEEN WAITED FOR 
THE MODERN READER'S CHAUCER 

The Complete Poetical Works of 
Geoffrey Chaucer 

Now first put into modern English by 

JOHN S. P. TATLOCK 

Author of " The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works," 

AND 

PERCY MacKAYE 

Author of" The Canterbury Pilgrims," etc. 

With 32 full-page illustrations in color by Warwick Goble 

Decorated cloth, 4to, $5.00 net 

Any one unversed in old English is familiar with 
the difficulty of reading Chaucer in the original — to 
many it is not only a difficulty, but an impossibility. 
The vast literary wealth of Chaucer''s writings has 
been therefore up to this time beyond the grasp of 
the general reader — for there has been no complete 
rendering in modern English. It is to do away 
with this condition that " The Modern Readers 
Chaucer" has been prepared. Adhering closely to 
the original, the editors have rendered in modern 
English all the wonderful tales of this early poet. 
A particular feature of the volume is the illustra- 
tions, of which there are thirty-two in colors from 
paintings by Warwick Goble, the celebrated Eng- 
lish artist. From the standpoint of artistic book 
making it is to be doubted if a handsomer book will 
be published for some time to come or even one 
which will stand comparison with this. 



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